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Just days after the United States government made a historic shift in federal cannabis policy by reclassifying the substance from a heavily restricted Schedule I to a more lenient Schedule III controlled substance, Barbados’ top medicinal cannabis regulator is leveraging this global policy change to pressure local commercial banks to finally provide financial services to the island nation’s licensed legal cannabis operators. This long-running banking impasse has left the fledgling regulated industry locked out of basic financial services, even after the island legalized medicinal cannabis years ago.

In an official statement released hours after the U.S. Department of Justice announced its rescheduling decision Thursday, Shanika Roberts-Odle, acting chief executive of the Barbados Medicinal Cannabis Licensing Authority (BMCLA), framed the U.S. move as a long-overdue validation of what Barbados’ Rastafarian community has argued for generations.

“This development represents a meaningful acknowledgment of what our Rastafarian brethren and many others have articulated for generations — that cannabis is a natural plant with significant medical and wellness potential,” Roberts-Odle said.

She noted that the U.S. policy shift is expected to resolve many of the persistent banking barriers that have hampered the legal cannabis industry across the United States, and she called on local Barbadian banks to use this global momentum to revisit their own blanket refusal to serve licensed local operators. Despite the policy shift abroad, Roberts-Odle acknowledged that the decision has not yet changed the official position of the Barbados Bankers’ Association, which has continued to bar accounts for cannabis companies.

“We implore the banking sector to take yet another look at this matter and to communicate with their correspondent banking partners toward the potential of allowing the banking of medicinal cannabis funds in Barbados,” she added.

The BMCLA chief said the regulator remains “cautiously optimistic” about the future growth of the local medicinal cannabis industry, as it continues to build out the sector aligned with evolving international standards, evidence-based regulation, and ongoing national stakeholder dialogue focused on advancing the public good. Currently, the BMCLA regulates just two fully licensed commercial medicinal cannabis facilities operating in Barbados: Island Therapeutics and Island Naturals. Roberts-Odle stressed that both operators operate in full compliance with the authority’s strict regulatory requirements.

She also issued a public reminder to Barbadians that while medicinal cannabis is legally available to patients with a valid doctor’s prescription dispensed through a licensed pharmacist per national law, recreational cannabis use and distribution remains fully illegal across the island.

Local financial institutions, however, maintain that their hands remain tied by the policies of their international correspondent banking partners, which handle cross-border transactions and have refused to create pathways for cannabis-related funds. While the BBA president Shimon McIntosh could not be reached for direct comment on the regulator’s new appeal, Steve Belle, chief executive of the City of Bridgetown Cooperative Credit Union (COB) — the island’s second largest credit union — explained why the local financial sector still cannot open accounts for licensed operators.

“We can’t; because, as it stands now, the situation is that our correspondent banks typically don’t have those systems in place to actually accept funds from medical marijuana. Until that is done, we can’t go and expose ourselves because we depend on correspondent banking relations,” Belle told local outlet Barbados TODAY.

The U.S. rescheduling has been broadly welcomed by Rastafarian leaders in Barbados, who have long campaigned for full recognition of cannabis’ cultural and medicinal role in their community. Ras Paul Simba Rock, a senior Rastafarian leader, president and founder of the African Heritage Foundation, and a key member of the National Rastafarian Registry and Trust, applauded the U.S. for acknowledging cannabis’ inherent medicinal properties, but argued that the classification distinction between recreational and medical cannabis is an artificial separation.

“I, personally, and I know the rest of the Rastafari community welcome the acknowledgment of the US, that we love to follow and look up to, to say that, within its raw state, it’s medicinal. There is no difference between medical cannabis and regular cannabis. All cannabis is medicinal. That is the trick that has been played on Barbados. The only difference is the regulation,” he said.

Rock added that the most valuable therapeutic properties of cannabis come from the whole plant, not processed cannabinoid extracts or modified forms of the substance created through scientific manipulation. He also noted that the general public of Barbados has long accepted and used cannabis for its natural medicinal benefits, long before formal legalization of the medicinal form.

To clarify the context of the U.S. policy change, Schedule III substances are defined as drugs with a lower potential for abuse than the more tightly restricted Schedule I and II categories, with officially accepted medical uses in the U.S. Abuse of Schedule III substances can lead to moderate low physical dependence or high psychological dependence. By contrast, Schedule I substances are categorized as having a high abuse potential, no accepted medical use in the U.S., and lack accepted safety for use under medical supervision. Under U.S. federal law, Schedule I substances cannot be legally prescribed or dispensed for medical use, and are restricted almost exclusively to approved research settings.

A heated debate over the future of Barbados’ state-owned Transport Board has taken center stage at a recent public policy forum, where Prime Minister Mia Mottley pushed back hard against growing speculation that her administration intends to fully privatize the public transit entity. Instead, Mottley has reframed the widely discussed restructuring effort as a worker empowerment initiative that pairs expanded employee ownership with stricter island-wide regulation to guarantee reliable service for all communities, including underserved rural areas.

The controversy reignited Wednesday during the Ideas Forum, where opposition St Peter candidate Jason Phillips of the Democratic Labour Party raised long-simmering public concerns about the government’s restructuring plans. Phillips echoed warnings first circulated late last year, when an official three-page letter from the Ministry of Transport and Works, signed by then-Permanent Secretary Jehu Wiltshire, was leaked to the public. The document confirmed that Cabinet had approved a transition to a new governing body, the Barbados Mass Transit Authority (BMTA), which would take over regulatory oversight of all public transit and hold the legal bill of sale for the Transport Board’s bus fleet. The leak triggered immediate pushback from the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados, which raised alarms about potential job insecurity and diminished service for rural residents.

At the forum, Phillips doubled down on those concerns, arguing that profit-driven private operators would inevitably abandon low-revenue rural routes — such as those serving Boscobel and Indian Ground, where ridership is often thin during early morning and late-night trips. “I can’t see a businessman wanting to take his vehicle… to deep Boscobel with three people in it,” Phillips said, calling for binding legislation to mandate that critical routes and consistent schedules be maintained regardless of profitability. He emphasized that his concern centered on reliable access, not opposition to worker ownership, stressing that the priority must be protecting vulnerable rural commuters who depend entirely on public transit.

Mottley drew a clear distinction between traditional privatization and what she calls “enfranchisement” to counter Phillips’ arguments, flatly stating: “There is no divestment of the Transport Board or privatization.” She explained that the proposed restructuring model would give Transport Board drivers and existing workers ownership stakes within the new system, rather than selling the entire entity to outside private investors. “We have said from the beginning that there is no divestment in the traditional sense. There is enfranchisement,” the prime minister said. “At the end of the day… the enfranchisement that is being entertained is to allow the drivers and the workers at the Transport Board to own.”

Under the plan, the newly created BMTA will serve as a centralized regulator overseeing all public transit services across the island, including the Transport Board’s buses, independent minibuses, and route taxis. Mottley noted that the fragmented current system lacks consistent day-to-day oversight, a gap the BMTA will fill by enforcing strict licensing requirements. Operators that fail to meet their scheduled route obligations will lose their licenses, and the authority will implement a route rotation system to ensure no operator is stuck with only unprofitable routes, while no entity can hoard high-traffic, high-revenue corridors at the expense of rural communities. “If at the end of the day you are not operating your route to the terms and conditions of the license… you are out,” Mottley said, adding that the structure guarantees equitable service for all regions.

Transport and Works Minister Kirk Humphrey reinforced Mottley’s position, dismissing any claims that outside private companies would take over the Transport Board. “There’s no company that’s coming in to own the Transport Board or none of those things you’re alluding to,” Humphrey said. He outlined that the government will retain supporting oversight while transferring bus ownership directly to workers, with the BMTA enforcing service standards to close long-standing gaps in rural transit. “The people will get a better service as opposed to less quality of service by the route that we are going,” he added.

Critics have pointed out that Mottley and other senior members of her administration previously openly described the restructuring as a divestment effort, even as they framed it as worker-focused. During prior parliamentary debates and media appearances, top officials repeatedly used the term “divestment of the Transport Board” to describe the project. Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw, who previously served as Transport and Works Minister, told Parliament that the “divestment of the Barbados Transport Board” was “a serious exercise in enfranchisement” and guaranteed that concessions for elderly residents and schoolchildren would remain in place. At a ceremony marking the handover of 35 new electric buses at Bridgetown Port, Bradshaw told reporters: “the government is moving ahead with divesting the Transport Board amid growing public opposition and establishing a new mass transit system,” adding that “when we speak of divestment, we also equally speak of the enfranchisement of the workers of Barbados and the workers of the Barbados Transport Board.”

The restructuring effort comes in response to decades of financial and operational instability at the Transport Board, which has required hundreds of millions in state subsidies to remain operational. Successive governments have called for a more sustainable funding model, while activists and opposition leaders have pushed to protect service access for low-income and rural commuters. The Mottley administration has repeatedly stated that vulnerable groups, including schoolchildren, pensioners, and low-wage essential workers, will retain their existing fare concessions and service access under the new framework. Despite the prime minister’s clarifications at the forum, Phillips maintained that the risk of profit-driven service cuts remains, and that ongoing public scrutiny will be needed to hold the government accountable to its promises.