MJBizMag April 2021 - 66

Sweet Leaf
customers that pissed off the neighbors,
and so the city of Denver wasn't stoked
with us. We had become somewhat of
a nuisance based on how busy we
were-and we weren't in neighborhoods
where that was OK.
In the Highlands, they didn't want to
see people out the door when they're
walking their children to the park. The
neighborhood still had a very NIMBYian
view of cannabis.
We had shifts where we would go
clean up trash because customers were
disrespectful. People would go buy weed
and leave papers on the ground in these
neighborhoods. We would be chasing
these papers around.
But at a certain point, we had so
much business that it was hard to keep
up. It was hard to keep up with maintaining
everything in the neighborhood
properly while growing at the rate that
we were.
The city was receiving nuisance reports
from neighbors that the customers were
leaving trash and weed jars all over the
ground. That was a problem.
Was there anything Sweet
Leaf could have done
differently?
Taken a more conservative approach. We
were pushing the limit. We were trying to
change things.
Realistically, how should you read
the law? It never once said you can't let
somebody come back twice in one day.
Never. It never said we were responsible
for knowing how much someone had
purchased in one day.
From our understanding, it was,
" Regulate like alcohol. " You don't track
people's beers, so why would we track
your weed?
What happened to the
inventory during the raids
and seizure?
Everything got taken. When the raid first
happened, because this was a Denver
issue, the stores that were not in Denver
were not shut down.
At the root of the Sweet Leaf situation was the practice of " looping, " where one customer would buy
many ounces of flower in a single day, well over the legal limit of 1 ounce. Photo by Matt Staver
The city of Aurora wasn't willing to
even shut them down. They were like,
" That's not against the law. " The city of
Aurora did not understand (Denver's rationale),
and the same thing with Federal
Heights (another Denver suburb).
So (Sweet Leaf was) able to operate in
those two cities. In the city of Denver,
which is where their grows were, everything
got shut down.
I'm assuming the plants rotted. I wasn't
there, though.
You were generating tax
revenue. Did that seem to
matter to prosecutors?
The state. The city. Jobs-we had
400 employees. Think about how much
money that is for the economy.
The owners are the most kind,
salt-of-the-earth, good, working people
I've ever known in my life. We thought
we were all on the same team. That's
where we went wrong.
It turned out to be Sweet Leaf versus
the world.
Why weren't you able to fight
back more?
On a city level, we would have been
able to, and on a state level, we would
have been able to. But the state Attorney
66 Marijuana Business Magazine | April 2021
General's Office was going to be the next
court that we hit. We were terrified of
federal court.
That's where I tapped out. I ran
out of money. My lawyer said, " It's a
$150,000 retainer to go to a federal
trial. " Federal trial was a big deal and
terrifying, and we would have faced 10
years in jail-federal prison.
We were out of options. ... I had
nothing left.
The Denver Police
Department worked
on the case for a year
and a half. Their
budget was endless
and ours was pennies.
None of us had the
money. Every penny
I had was going to
pay my lawyer. It was
exhausting.
I wish every day that
I was rich. I wish every day that I had the
ability to do this for the industry, to fight
harder. I wish I had it in me. But I didn't.
(The police) had invested so much.
They'd sunk their teeth into us. At that
point, there was no going back.
This interview has been edited for length
and clarity.

MJBizMag April 2021

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