Canada’s Cannabis Companies Can Ring the Bell on U.S. Stock Markets. American Minority Owners Can’t Even Get a Bank Loan.

Here is the thing that nobody in the legal cannabis industry likes to say out loud: the War on Drugs was disproportionately waged against Black and brown communities. Decades of aggressive policing, mandatory minimums, and asset forfeiture stripped wealth and futures from neighborhoods that never had much margin to begin with. Then, state by state, America decided cannabis wasn’t so bad after all. The industry that emerged from that reversal became one of the fastest-growing in the country — and the communities that bore the brunt of prohibition were, in most cases, left watching from outside the glass.

Now there’s a Cannabis Inquirer’s legislative tracker in Congress that tries, in one very specific and measurable way, to fix that. The Capital Lending and Investment for Marijuana Businesses Act — the CLIMB Act — was introduced this week by Representative Troy Carter (D-LA) and Representative Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA). It is bipartisan. It is targeted. And if it passes, it would do something that sounds almost embarrassingly obvious: let minority-owned, veteran-owned, and small cannabis businesses in the United States access the same lending services and investment tools their foreign competitors already have.

That the industry needed a bill to make this happen should tell you something about how we got here.

The Capital Gap Nobody Wanted to Talk About

To understand why the CLIMB Act matters, you need to understand what it’s like to try to build a cannabis business in America right now if you don’t have access to private wealth.

Federal prohibition means that most traditional banks won’t touch cannabis operators. No business checking accounts. No lines of credit. No SBA loans. No CDFI grants. Nothing. You either bring your own money, find investors willing to operate in legal gray zones, or you don’t build. For the entrepreneurs who were supposed to be the face of cannabis equity — the people legalization advocates promised the industry would uplift — this is where the promise quietly dies.

It doesn’t die in a press release. It dies in a banker’s office when a woman who grew up in a neighborhood ravaged by drug arrests sits down to talk about her business plan and gets told there’s nothing they can do for her. It dies in the gap between what a state equity license promises and what actually getting the doors open requires.

Meanwhile — and this is the part that should infuriate people — a Canadian cannabis company can list on American stock exchanges. They can access U.S. capital markets. They can raise money from American investors. A domestic minority business owner cannot get a basic bank loan.

Saphira Galoob, CEO of the U.S. Cannabis Roundtable, put it plainly: “Right now, Canadian cannabis companies can ring the bell at U.S. stock markets and access American capital markets while domestic cannabis businesses are largely locked out of even the most basic financial services. That’s not a level playing field.”

That’s not a partisan statement. That’s just a description of what exists.

What the CLIMB Act Would Actually Do

The legislation is specific enough to be worth reading closely. At its core, it would create safe harbor protections for private financial institutions that want to offer lending services to state-legal cannabis businesses — meaning a bank that issues a loan to a compliant cannabis operator wouldn’t face federal sanction for doing so. That protection, straightforward as it sounds, is currently absent, and its absence is precisely why cannabis operators operate in a financial system that looks more like 1975 than 2026.

Beyond private banking, the bill would also unlock government agencies. Community Development Financial Institutions — CDFIs, which exist specifically to serve under-resourced entrepreneurs — would be permitted to issue grants and financial support to cannabis businesses. The Small Business Administration and the Minority Business Development Association would be able to function the way they’re supposed to: helping small business owners access capital and grow.

This isn’t the first attempt. SAFE Banking has floated through Congress in various forms for years, repeatedly passing the House and stalling in the Senate. The CLIMB Act is narrower in some ways — it’s not trying to restructure the entire banking landscape — but it’s also more targeted. It explicitly names the communities most harmed by prohibition as the intended beneficiaries, and it draws a line between what equity rhetoric promises and what a single piece of legislation might deliver.

Mike Lomuto, Board Chairman of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, called it “an important step toward expanding financial access for small, minority, and women-owned cannabis businesses.” He was careful with language — an important step, not a solution. That’s the right framing.

The Quiet Attrition Nobody Talks About

What gets lost in most cannabis equity coverage is the timeline problem. social equity licensing bottlenecks licenses are the entry point, but they are not the finish line. The finish line is a sustainable business. And the gap between those two things — between holding a license and keeping the lights on — is where most equity operators disappear.

It’s not dramatic when it happens. A license holder can’t get credit to stock their shelves. A minority-owned cultivator can’t get a bridge loan to make payroll during a slow month. A veteran-owned dispensary can’t fund the renovation that would let them compete with the MSO that opened across the street. They close. The license gets redistributed or lapses. And the industry that positioned itself as a force for repair watches another small operator exit quietly, then goes back to talking about its commitment to equity at the next trade show.

Representative Carter framed the CLIMB Act explicitly in this context. “By working directly with small, minority, and veteran-owned cannabis businesses, it’s clear that access to capital remains one of the biggest barriers to entry and to success in the industry,” he said. “By bringing symmetry into the business ecosystem with the CLIMB Act, we can help communities that have long been harmed by the criminalization of marijuana become leaders in business — and that’s what the American Dream is all about.”

That language is aspirational, as it should be. But the policy mechanism it describes is concrete: safe harbor, grants, SBA access. That’s not a promise of equity. That’s an attempt to remove one of the structural barriers that has made equity promises hollow.

The Test Is Whether It Moves

Bills get introduced. Bills stall. The history of cannabis reform is littered with legislation that died in committee while the industry kept growing in ways that left behind the people it claimed to serve.

So the honest question isn’t whether the CLIMB Act is good policy. It is. The question is whether there’s political will to move it — whether the bipartisan framing (a Louisiana Democrat and a Pennsylvania Republican walking in together) can sustain momentum in a Congress that has repeatedly found ways to deprioritize cannabis-related legislation even when it had majority support.

That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition.

What makes the CLIMB Act worth watching is that it’s asking for something specific and defensible. It doesn’t require anyone to endorse legalization. It doesn’t require anyone to take a position on scheduling. It asks a targeted question: should American minority business owners be able to access the same financial tools that foreign cannabis companies already use in American markets? If the answer is yes — and it should be — then the CLIMB Act gives Congress a clean vehicle to say so.

The communities that bore the cost of prohibition have been waiting for a long time. They’re still waiting. But at least someone in Washington is finally asking the right question and attaching a bill number to it.

Maya Torres covers the human side of cannabis policy — expungement, equity, and medical access — for CannabisInquirer.com.