Last week, three dispensary owners in Colorado were sentenced to one year in prison, in what is being called a landmark case. It was the first time local authorities prosecuted a legal marijuana business, anywhere in the U.S. Sweet Leaf was a cannabis company with several locations, many of them in Denver. Within the industry, it was known for doing a truly astonishing amount of business. Last week, the three co-owners (Matthew Aiken, Christian Johnson and Anthony Sauro) all pleaded guilty to encouraging the practice of “looping” at their stores. Customers would come into the store and purchase the legal limit — one ounce — and would return later than day, to purchase another ounce. Then they’d do it all over again — sometimes up to 40 times per day, according to investigators. Nearly 2.5 tons of marijuana were diverted to the black market, authorities said. The owners’ attorneys argued that the legal limit only applied to each transaction — not each day. The law had a loophole, they said. But in late 2017, two Sweet Leaf executives (Nichole West and Ashley Goldstein) accepted plea deals. They agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for lighter sentences. (They each served 30 days in jail, after pleading guilty to felony drug charges.) The ruling is a “cautionary tale,” for the industry, explains the Marijuana Business Daily. It shows “what can happen when a high-flying MJ business pushes the envelope and violates the spirit of the law.” Denver seemed to want to make an example out of Sweet Leaf. In the deal reached last week, the owners agreed to pay roughly two million in fines and back taxes. All their Colorado marijuana business licenses were revoked, and they had to agree to stay out of the industry for 15 years. The charges against the low-level budtenders, who were arrested before the executives and owners, were dismissed, after the budtenders performed community service and donated small sums to charity. The budtenders had been arrested in 2017. The owners were sentenced last week, after Denver prosecutors made the case that the owners had encouraged the looping practice. The “repeat customers” who sold Sweet Leaf's weed on the black market have not been charged.