 Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday that lawful marijuana businesses should have access to the American banking system and that the government would soon offer rules to help them gain it. “You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places. They want to be able to use the banking system," Holder said during an appearance at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. “There’s a public safety component to this. Huge amounts of cash, substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited, is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective.” 
 
 For marijuana growers and retailers in the 20 states that have legalized the drug for recreational or medical use, money and banking are perhaps the most vexing challenges of doing business. While marijuana is illegal in most states and is prohibited under federal law, the Obama administration said last summer that it would allow Colorado and Washington State to move ahead with legalizing the drug for recreational use. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, President Obama said that despite his misgivings about marijuana and the push for broader legalization of the drug, it was important that Colorado’s and Washington’s experiments go forward.
– The Obama administration will soon take the radical step of allowing legal pot businesses to actually put their money in banks—sort of. At an event yesterday, Eric Holder said he was working with the Treasury Department on new regulations and would unveil them "very soon," Politico reports. "There's a public safety component to this," the attorney general explained. "Substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around ... is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective." But a Justice Department spokesperson later said that it would merely issue legal "guidance" telling prosecutors not to prioritize such cases. That might not be enough for banks; the American Bankers Association tell the New York Times that they'll want "a lot of detail from regulators"—and assurances they won't be prosecuted—before they'll feel comfortable taking the money. States with legalized marijuana have been clamoring for such a change, as have the companies themselves, who say they're overburdened with cash. But the Times notes it's unclear whether what the DOJ is preparing would extend to all states that have OKed medical marijuana, or just Colorado and Washington. It would be a rare pro-pot step from what's been a virulently anti-pot administration, and comes on the heels of President Obama's recent much-discussed comments on it.