TRANSPORTATION & LOGISTICS
Cannabis Transportation Insurance Is Near Impossible — But This Broker Got It Done
As seen in Risk & Insurance | December 6, 2019
Risk & Insurance recently published a feature story spotlighting EPIC’s Maron Impagliazzo. The article covered everything from his unlikely path to an insurance career, to getting cannabis on the road by finding a commercial auto insurer for Rising Logistic so that they could distribute marijuana.
“Nobody wanted it, it was the beginning of cannabis, all of the big insurance carriers wouldn’t touch it because of the federal illegal status. My team and I thought on our feet in that situation.”
– Maron Impagliazzo, Transportation Power Broker
As the article states, when medical and recreational marijuana legalization swept the country in 2018, growers, distributors, and their brokers had one major question: How are we going to get commercial auto insurance to cover this?
The potential for theft and the federal prohibition of cannabis made transporting cannabis a risk many commercial auto insurers didn’t want to take on, and brokers were balking at how to find coverage for their clients.
Maron Impagliazzo, vice president at EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He worked to secure coverage for his client, cannabis distributor Rise Logistics, placing them among the first distributors in the state of California to receive a motor carrier filing permit and earning Impagliazzo a 2019 Power Broker award.
“Transportation’s always challenging, which is what makes it really fun. No two accounts are exactly the same. They can do the exact same thing, but everybody has different challenges.”
– Maron Impagliazzo, Transportation Power Broker
