Congress Wants Cannabis on the Big Board. The CLIMB Act Says Let It Try.
The United States has spent the better part of a decade building a legal cannabis industry and then punishing it for existing.
Companies operate under state licenses, collect state taxes, employ state residents and submit to state audits — then hit a wall the moment they need a bank account, a line of credit, an insurance policy or a listing on a national securities exchange.
The CLIMB Act, revived this month by Reps. Troy Carter and Guy Reschenthaler, is Congress's latest attempt to fix one piece of that contradiction.
Its Jan. 13, 2026 discussion draft would prohibit federal agencies from penalizing a person or company solely for providing business assistance to a state-legal cannabis operation and would amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to create a safe harbor for exchanges and market participants to list, trade or facilitate offerings of cannabis-related securities.
It would take effect 180 days after enactment.
The bill is narrow, deliberate and revealing. Congress is not debating whether cannabis should be legal. Forty states and counting have already answered that. Congress is debating whether the domestic industry those states built can access the same capital-market plumbing that every other regulated sector takes for granted.
Marijuana Moment's report on the reintroduction confirms the new bill is substantively identical to a 2022 version that never advanced, with technical formatting changes. The discussion draft makes the ambition plain: this is the CLIMB Act cannabis stock exchanges argument in legislative text, a formal bid to stop treating routine financial participation as federal contamination.
The protections in the draft reach well past the trading floor.
Section 2 covers financial products and services, insurance, debt and equity capital, accounting, real estate, production inputs, testing, advertising, management consulting, legal and compliance work, software, communications, packaging, transportation, logistics and securities underwriting.
Section 3 defines market participants — broker-dealers, underwriters, clearing agencies, investment advisers, self-regulatory organizations, transfer agents — and states that it would not be unlawful for those players or a national securities exchange to list, trade in or facilitate offerings of cannabis-related securities.
The bill does not order Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange to rubber-stamp every applicant. It removes a legal threat. What markets and institutions do with that room is a separate question.
The ancillary-service language deserves as much attention as the stock-market hook. CLIMB does not reserve its protections for plant-touching multistate operators with the best lobbyists and the cleanest pitch decks. It reaches the accountant who signs the books, the landlord who leases compliant space, the testing lab that certifies product, the marketing firm, the software vendor, the logistics company that keeps a supply chain intact.
In a functional market, those businesses are the infrastructure. Federal ambiguity has forced many of them to price existential risk into every contract or walk away entirely. CLIMB tells them Congress sees the work as commerce. That is a low bar. The fact that it still needs to be cleared tells you where the bar has been.
The contradiction the bill targets has been hiding in plain sight. AP reported in December that companies like Canopy Growth and Curaleaf trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange while federal rules still wall off many American operators from domestic listings. The industry has watched investor enthusiasm spike on every rumor of reform and crash back to the same structural problem: legal in the states, suspect in Washington, expensive everywhere money touches the plant. CLIMB intervenes at the exact point where optimism usually dies — somewhere between compliance counsel and the capital stack — and tries to keep it alive long enough to matter.
Rescheduling is not the same thing
Timing makes this bill more urgent than its predecessor. The Trump administration's Dec. 18 executive order revived expectations that marijuana could move from Schedule I to Schedule III, and that shift would carry real consequences. AP noted that rescheduling could reduce the tax burden on cannabis companies and ease research restrictions. The Ohio State Drug Enforcement and Policy Center's explainer lays out the mechanics: Schedule III would change the drug's classification under the Controlled Substances Act and could eliminate the crushing tax consequences tied to IRS code 280E. The same explainer makes clear that rescheduling is a formal rulemaking process with multiple steps and that Congress retains the authority to make broader cannabis-specific changes.
The distinction matters because rescheduling cannot do what CLIMB is designed to do. Reuters put the point directly: even under reclassification, marijuana would remain a controlled substance under federal law, and large-bank participation would still face serious hurdles without explicit congressional action. Reuters quoted analysts and industry voices saying improved optics are not improved access. Anyone who has followed this space longer than one news cycle already knows the pattern. A friendlier federal posture lifts sentiment. It does not produce term sheets, treasury services, broad insurance coverage or a clean path to a U.S. exchange listing.
The existing compliance architecture proves the point. The Treasury Department's 2014 FinCEN guidance still governs how financial institutions serve marijuana-related businesses under the Bank Secrecy Act, complete with intensive due diligence and suspicious activity reporting requirements. FinCEN's FOIA records page still directs banks and the public to marijuana-related-business metrics updated through December 2024. Federal officials are still tracking cannabis banking as a special compliance category. That is managed-exception status, not normal commerce. CLIMB would not erase every federal contradiction, though it would try to collapse one of the most commercially punishing ones.
The economic damage from that contradiction is well-documented. A 2021 Journal of Business Economics study found that legally restricted banking access leaves U.S. marijuana firms struggling to obtain financing and handling transactions largely in cash, producing inefficiency and serious security exposure. Cannabis operators do not need Congress to discover some novel theory of public safety. They have been living the receipts — the armored transport bills, the extra compliance overhead, the constant institutional reminder that money becomes controversial the moment a legal plant is involved.
The politics are where this gets harder
CLIMB's narrowness is its political asset and its moral limitation. Carter's office describes the measure as an expansion of access to lending, investments and related protections for state-legal cannabis businesses, including small, minority-owned and veteran-owned operators. That framing produces a cleaner bipartisan pitch than full legalization, interstate commerce or large-scale expungement. Marijuana Moment also reported that the broader SAFER Banking Act had not been refiled in the 119th Congress as of March 19, 2026. Congress is once again choosing the version of cannabis reform that speaks fluent capital markets and quiet on everything else.
The skepticism that invites is earned. In its 2023 statement on SAFE Banking, the Drug Policy Alliance argued that banking safe harbors do not change marijuana's legal status and warned that limited access to commercial loans can further squeeze small and minority-owned businesses while large multistate operators consolidate advantage. The Drug Policy Alliance and the Cannabis Regulators of Color Coalition pushed for provisions ensuring that past marijuana criminal records would not automatically function as red flags in banking reviews and that directly impacted entrepreneurs would not keep getting boxed out. That critique targeted SAFE, not CLIMB, though the underlying question transfers cleanly: who benefits first when Congress decides cannabis can be respectable enough for Wall Street yet unworthy of comprehensive repair?
That question sits at the center of every incremental cannabis bill Congress produces. The CLIMB Act cannabis stock exchanges debate is about more than whether U.S. operators can ring the bell on a major exchange. It is about whether lawmakers can deliver an industry-centered reform while expungement, equitable market entry and the collateral wreckage of prohibition remain unaddressed. That tension does not make CLIMB pointless. It makes the bill a partial answer offered in place of a full one — and it puts the burden on its sponsors to explain why the capital-markets piece keeps arriving ahead of the justice piece.
Why Arizona should care
Arizona makes this concrete. In July 2025, Attorney General Kris Mayes joined a bipartisan coalition backing federal cannabis banking reform, arguing that cash-heavy operations create public-safety risks and make tax collection and oversight harder. That rationale applies to CLIMB without modification. Arizona runs a mature, regulated cannabis market. Its operators, landlords, accountants, software vendors, insurers and logistics companies still have to factor federal uncertainty into decisions that would be routine in any other legal industry. Readers who follow CIGAWEEDS already know the absurdity: a product sold legally under Arizona law can still trigger federal hesitation the moment the conversation turns from flower to credit, payroll, underwriting or expansion.
If CLIMB ever becomes law, the immediate result would be clarity — for ancillary service providers, for exchanges weighing cannabis-related listings, for institutional capital that currently treats every state-legal cannabis relationship like a reputational biohazard. The longer result would still depend on Congress, regulators, exchanges and banks deciding how much appetite they have for a structure that remains legally incomplete. No provision in the draft guarantees a flood of listings. No paragraph dissolves federal prohibition for ordinary state commerce. The bill is narrower than that, which is precisely why it has a shot at attracting bipartisan patience — and precisely why it leaves the larger contradiction untouched.
The honest read on CLIMB is straightforward. It is a real reform with real commercial consequences if passed. It could make capital access, ancillary services and exchange participation measurably less absurd for state-legal businesses. It would also leave intact the central American contradiction: a country that keeps building cannabis markets at the state level while federal law treats the entire sector as a tolerated problem. Congress may find it easier to solve the stock ticker before it solves the justice question. Arizona already knows the cost of pretending that is enough.
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