23 Arrested Locally In Nationwide Bath Salts, Spice Crackdown

PONTIAC (WWJ) - Twenty-three people from Oakland and Macomb Counties have been arrested as part of a nationwide crackdown on banned synthetic drugs, known as Spice, Bath Salts and Molly.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the drugs are being manufactured in China and delivered to Michiganders.

Spokesman Khalid Walls warns that these substances are dangerous substances.

"The real problem here is that a synthetic drug is just that, it's a synthetic," Walls told WWJ Newsradio 950. "No one really knows what's in it, unless you're a chemist and you can definitively establish exactly what's in it, it's basically like putting poison in the body."

Walls says the synthetic drugs are being distributed just like cocaine and heroine, to a younger crowd.

"From the information that we've developed in Metro Detroit, young people are a target," Walls said. "You know, teens and early 20s are the main sort of demographic that is interested in these types of drugs."

A similar bust last year netted about one ton of synthetic drugs.

The names of those arrested this week were not immediately released.

Bath salts made national headlines in back in 2012 when the stimulant drug was blamed for so-called "zombie attacks" — including one in Miami, Florida, during which a suspect dubbed "The Causeway Cannibal" was reported to have been under the influence of the substance when he chewed the face off a homeless man.

A medical examiner later ruled that the 31-year-old did not have bath salts in his system at the time.