Previously in this series: Delivering cannabis — and cash — in California
Where recreational cannabis is legal
One result of the 2018 midterm elections was the addition of Michigan to the list of states that have created new markets for legal recreational cannabis — places where transportation opportunities are expected to grow around the product, shown in red on the map above.
The growing trend in legalization is part of what Hardcar driver-agent Sergio Buenrostro, who moves the product in cargo vans, calls the “slow crawl” toward nationwide acceptance of cannabis use. Even in California, Buenrostro says, there are plenty who feel it’s “going to corrupt the children,” a sentiment at odds with what he saw in his last post before he joined Hardcar — as a security contractor to the U.S. State Department in the Netherlands. There, he feels, cannabis is viewed as a routine element of the broader culture.
Buenrostro, a military veteran, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, for which cannabis can be a salve for some. While the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs “feeds you pills and you walk around in a cloud” as a means of treating PTSD, he says, “every veteran that I know who has turned to cannabis has totally left pills behind.”
