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Medical pot supporter’s bank account up in smoke

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Medical pot supporter’s bank account up in smoke

Wells Fargo & Co. has gotten into a lot of trouble lately for opening bank accounts without permission. Now it’s getting attention for closing one.

Nikki Fried, a Democrat running for agriculture commissioner in Florida and a strong supporter of medical marijuana, said bank employees questioned her campaign about her pro-cannabis platform, including whether the campaign would be receiving money from medical marijuana industry lobbyists. When campaign officials answered in the affirmative, Wells Fargo responded by notifying the campaign it would be closing the account.

In response, Ms. Fried urged her supporters to consider pulling their money from the bank, according to the New York Times. BB&T Corp., which now maintains Ms. Fried’s campaign account, and other financial institutions including Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said their banks did not have policies that would prevent them from offering services to Ms. Fried.

Wells Fargo has received quite a bit of negative attention in the last two years ever since news broke that the bank opened consumer or small business accounts, credit cards or lines of credit without customer knowledge between 2002 and April 2017. In June, the bank said a district court in California approved a $142 million class-action settlement to compensate customers who were affected by the sales scandal related to the opening of phony bank accounts, after agreeing in April to pay $1 billion to settle with regulators who say it layered insurance on hundreds of thousands of drivers and routinely hit homebuyers with excessive fees. More recently, it agreed to pay a $2.09 billion penalty for alleged misrepresentation of loan quality, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Medical marijuana is legal in 30 states and the District of Columbia while nine states and Washington have legalized recreational use. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, on par with cocaine and heroin, making it illegal under federal law.

“This is absolutely unprecedented,” Ms. Fried said in an interview with the Times. “I’ve been in this campaign since the beginning of June. Everybody in Florida knows that I’m one of the main proponents of the expansion of medical marijuana.”

She’d have my vote – if I lived in Florida.

 

 

 

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