After more than 15 years as a police officer, Ralph Miller took up a new job. In some ways, it's familiar work: driving around with a partner and staying alert for potential threats. But his new ride is an unmarked van filled with cannabis.
Every week, Miller pulls up to a cultivator and loads up the van with prescription-grade containers of medical marijuana to take to dispensaries across Pennsylvania. He works for Talaria, the largest cannabis transporter in the state, which hires former law enforcement to haul around $1.5 billion in product a year.
"It's not that big of a transition," said Miller, a former police officer for Baldwin Borough. "A lot of the skill sets that police officers have transition very, very well into this industry because the bottom line is, as a police officer, it's service oriented."
Cannabis transportation is a relatively new industry for Pennsylvania, carved out of regulations signed into law by former Gov. Tom Wolf when medical marijuana was legalized in 2016.
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