Canadian pot users, investors face roadblocks at U.S. border
WASHINGTON — People who work, invest or partake in Canada’s legal cannabis industry will continue to risk a lifetime ban from the United States as long as the drug remains a controlled substance under U.S. federal law, lawyers say — a prohibition some American pot producers are trying to change.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials won’t say how many would-be visitors from Canada have run afoul of a peculiar contradiction: Cannabis is legal for possession, cultivation and sale in several U.S. states but still against federal law.
With legal marijuana only a month old, a number of Canadians and their lawyers already have first-hand knowledge of the perils that await users, investors and industry workers at the Canada-U.S. border.
“It’s a double standard — they’re not enforcing it in the states but they are enforcing it at the borders,” said Len Saunders, a Canadian lawyer in Blaine, Wash., who specializes in U.S. immigration law.
“You can’t take a hands-off approach with the states and allow them to sell it, and in the same breath enforce federal laws to the T at ports of entry. It’s inconsistency, it’s hypocrisy and it creates this confusion.”
U.S. officials initially warned that any Canadian who gave off any whiff of pot involvement — from using the drug to working or investing in the industry — risked being banned or denied entry. The agency later said industry workers would generally be let in as long as they were travelling for reasons unrelated to their work.
Saunders said he spoke to one traveller who was intercepted last week in Vancouver and is now barred from the U.S. because he wanted to tour a Las Vegas cannabis production facility in which he’d become an investor.
“He’s kind of shell-shocked right now,” Saunders said. “He said, ‘I didn’t know anything about this.’ I said, ‘Haven’t you been reading the news?’”
The investor’s visit, part of a tour arranged by his financial adviser, happened to coincide with MJBizCon, a major cannabis industry conference last week in Las Vegas. A number of travellers heading to that conference have reported being pulled aside for secondary screening.
The man told officials he’s just an investor, had never used pot and would never have tried to travel had he known the risk. Officials had been notified about the Vegas conference and told to be on the lookout for Canadian travellers, the lawyer added.
At Marigold PR, a marketing and public relations firm in Toronto with a number of cannabis-industry clients, travel to the U.S. is on hold and cross-border work is being done via Skype, FaceTime and other electronic means for now, said co-founder Bridget Hoffer.
Some U.S.-bound cannabis executives have even resorted to shipping their cellphones and business cards to U.S. destinations in advance to avoid border scrutiny, she added.
If the problems persist, many Canadian firms might end up focusing their international efforts on markets other than the U.S., such as Germany, Australia and Latin America, Hoffer said.
Some U.S. producers, meanwhile, are redoubling efforts to push a change in the federal law, which denies American companies the access to capital markets and financial services enjoyed by their Canadian counterparts.
Terra Tech Corp. chief executive Derek Peterson took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last month aimed at convincing President Donald Trump that the federal prohibition is forcing the U.S. industry to leave billions of dollars on the table. He’s now producing an ad for the U.S. president’s preferred medium: television.
“We’re going to run that in the environments that we think the president and his administration pays attention to, like ‘Fox and Friends,’” Peterson said.