Experts say that if there’s a federal crackdown on marijuana, it’ll probably start with cases where pot is seeping from states where it’s legal to where it’s illegal, or over banking issues, as opposed to a direct broadside on legal dispensaries.

The predictions came Monday during State of Pot, a forum on the marijuana industry organized by The Nevada Independent and held at UNLV. Panelists with experience in the federal court system tried to predict what might happen to the state’s nascent industry under the leadership of a marijuana opponent, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Former U.S. Attorney Richard Pocker said that a group of other former U.S. attorneys asked at a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein how the Trump Administration would treat marijuana after rescinding the Cole Memorandum, an Obama-era document that directed prosecutors to leave marijuana businesses alone if they were operating in a state-regulated marketplace.

“Somebody raised that with him in our group, and they were decidedly noncommittal about what they were going to do with respect to medical marijuana, recreational marijuana,” said Pocker, who was Nevada’s top federal prosecutor from 1989 to 1990.

Even as Nevada and other states build their marijuana markets, a looming specter remains that could potentially derail the blooming industry — a federal crackdown on marijuana, which is still illegal under federal law.

Fears from the industry were compounded in January, when Sessions announced he would nix the Cole Memo. Now discretion on the future of Nevada’s industry lies in the hands of new U.S. Attorney Dayle Elieson, who started earlier this year, hails from Texas and has offered few clues as to where she’ll go on the matter.

Pocker said there are several hypotheses on why Elieson came in. Although it’s not the first time there’s been a person from outside of Nevada appointed to the role, it’s rare, he said.

After the office was accused of prosecutorial misconduct in its handling of the high-profile Cliven Bundy case, Elieson may “really bring in a fresh set of eyes to assess the office,” he said.

“And then I’ve actually heard from somebody in the marijuana business that asked me whether or not I thought this was a signal that they were going to send people from D.C. who would not be afraid to bring these kinds of cases,” Pocker said. “I think that’s a little far-fetched. I’m more likely to believe the first scenario that they just, you know, we’ve had some leadership problems in that office, and again I think it’s more along those lines.”

He added that, with Elieson’s term only set to last for 120 days, we “may have a Nevadan in there before the end of the summer.”

By some accounts, not much has changed with the revocation of the memo, which simply removed cannabis from a special position and into the realm of other crimes. But lawyer Will Moschella, who previously worked in the Justice Department, argued that it still means something.

“I got an email from a very accomplished libertarian lawyer. He wrote me asking, ‘Was rescinding the Cole Memo merely symbolic?’ And my response was, 'it’s only symbolic if you thought the Cole Memo was symbolic,'” he said. “The Cole Memo, I think, became a de facto prosecution policy or non-prosecution policy.”

Regardless of their own views on pot, federal prosecutors face serious limitations on their ability to crack down on marijuana.

Lawyer Melissa Kuipers Blake, who has worked extensively on recreational marijuana issues in Colorado, said prosecutors will first consider whether they have the resources to carry out a crackdown, and secondly, whether they could win whatever case they bring forward. It would be tough to convince a jury in a pot-legal state like Nevada that a regulated business should be shut down, she said.

Moschella pointed out that on the southern border, prosecutors wouldn’t bring cases over trafficking unless it involved more than 1,000 pounds of drugs. Otherwise, they’d make the arrest, deport a person and burn the drugs, but they didn’t have the prosecutorial resources in some of the busiest districts to pursue each case.

Pocker drew on his experience as U.S. attorney in prior administrations to inform his perspective on the prospects now. A renewed focus on fighting drugs in the late 1980s was driven by violence and high-level criminal activity, especially when it related to Cuban gangs dealing in cocaine and Mexican gangs in the marijuana realm. The small U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada grew from two lawyers to seven lawyers in a short period of time.

“I would have them check out the possibility that the people who are running legal marijuana businesses are really running it and they’re not just a front,” Pocker said.

Money laundering and violation of banking law would also be a place to look, he said. He pointed out the vices that can emerge because federal restrictions block state-legal pot businesses from banking.

“It’s one of those aspects of the legal business that’s very similar to the illegal business … if you’re a cash-only business, a lot of bad things can happen to your cash between when you get it and when you deposit it,” he said. “If you cure that problem, then you can minimize the potential violence intended to the dispensaries, the kind of robberies and the kind of tax evasion and other crimes.”