DENVER – With Colorado’s allowance of marijuana to be sold for medical and recreational usage, MasterCard and Visa have loosened the regulations to let customers buy pot with plastic, the Denver Post reports. While the two credit and debit card processors previously said they had policies in place to prevent any illegal transactions from happening within their systems, now the pair have shifted the responsibility to the retailers’ banks to ensure the transactions are legal.

“In offering our payment service, Visa adheres to the rule of law and seeks to prevent our network from being used for unlawful purposes,” a company representative wrote in a statement to the newspaper. “In this instance, the federal government considers the sale of marijuana illegal but has announced that it will not challenge state laws that legalize and regulate marijuana sales. … Given the federal government's position and recognizing this is an evolving legal matter with different standards applicable in different states, our local merchant acquirers (banks) are best suited to make any determination about potential illegality.”

That position seems to be different from what happened last year when the Electronic Merchant Systems, which processed payments for the medical pot purchases, stopped accepting MasterCard and Visa, supposedly at the request of those companies. After federal agents raided some medical marijuana companies in Colorado and California in 2012, the two companies again refused to allow their branded cards to be used for marijuana purchases.

For the pot businesses in California and Colorado, the merchants are finding ways around it by hooking up ATMs — which operate on a different processing system than MasterCard or Visa — to non-business bank accounts. The retailers also are keeping hush on which banks they are working with to process credit and debit card payments.

Darin Smith, who co-owns the Denver Kush Club, said between 40% and 45% of his business comes from credit and debit card transactions. “It’s the option we're able to offer, and it provides a much more transparent transaction. As a business, we really want that,” he said. “We simply want to be treated as any other business, and we're acting as such.”