Sensible Washington is a political committee dedicated to ending marijuana prohibition in Washington State and to enacting sensible civil regulation of marijuana in Washington State. Recently Sensible Washington has struggled to get a major bank to process their online donations – here is their story:
Don’t Blame Us, Blame America’s Banks
February 4, 2010 – We’ve gotten numerous emails and comments on this site complaining about Sensible Washington not being set up for online contributions. Don’t blame us. Blame America’s banks.
PayPal has a long history of freezing the accounts of drug reform groups which use the company as their credit card processor. The company froze Seattle Hempfest’s account a couple of years ago and last year it did the same thing to the legalization campaign in Breckenridge, Colorado. The company basically assumes that any drug reform group is laundering drug money and makes the group fight them for a month or so before unfreezing the funds.
We decided early on not to use PayPal because we would then be poor custodians of both the public trust and public contributions, given PayPal’s history.
For the last two weeks, we’ve been working with a local credit card processor to find a bank that will process the public’s online contributions to our marijuana law reform campaign only to find America’s banks highly uncooperative and deeply discriminatory. On Tuesday, Wells Fargo shot down our processor telling him, “We won’t touch them.” Of course, if we were opening a bar or strip club, they’d have no problem with us. But marijuana legal reform? No way. Even though we are registered with the IRS as a 527 non-profit political organization. Even though we are duly registered with the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission.
Seriously, it’s still like 1955 out there for drug reform groups.
We do have an application in with another bank that will allegedly work with us, but we won’t know its final answer and have things set up online for about another week. And if they shoot us down….OK, we don’t want to think about that.
In the meantime, we can accept checks and some have been coming in, which are much appreciated. We know that people prefer to make contributions online these days, but until we can find a fair-minded bank to handle online contributions it would be great if people would consider writing us a check and putting it in the mail.
Our address is:
Sensible Washington
3161 Elliott Avenue, Suite 340
Seattle, WA 98121
Please make checks payable to Sensible Washington.
Thanks for your support.
Tags: Legalization, PayPal, Washington State
