After floods devastated Montpelier and much of the state last week, Lauren Andrews, owner of Capital Cannabis on Main Street, spent most of her days cleaning up her retail store in the hopes of reopening on Monday.
But when she arrived to open up this morning, she found the walls and floors coated in water from what appeared to be a water leak upstairs. “We’re going to have to gut the place and start from scratch,” Andrews said Monday afternoon.
On top of that unwelcome discovery, she and the rest of Vermont’s cannabis industry got potentially even more unwelcome news today: confirmation from federal officials that cannabis businesses would not be eligible for any of the federal disaster aid being made available to other types of businesses impacted by last week’s historic flooding.
“Because we are a federal agency, we have to follow federal law,” Carl Dombek, public information officer for the Small Business Administration, said at a press conference Monday. “Cannabis is not legal under federal law, and therefore we are not able to lend to cannabis dispensaries.”
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