'Operation Sweetie' Plugging Detroit-Up Drug North Pipeline

METRO DETROIT, MI – Michigan State Police, local and federal law enforcement authorities raided several Metro Detroit homes Wednesday as they in an enforcement effort known as “Operation Sweetie” that targets a group believed to trafficking in heroin and cocaine.

The multijurisdictional Operation Sweetie has been going on for nearly five years, and aims to shut down a drug pipeline from Metro Detroit to Traverse City in northern Michigan, where heroin and cocaine use, along with prostitution, have been on an uptick, The Detroit News and WWJ Radio.

“In Michigan, there’s just a huge heroin problem,” Lt. Mike Shaw of the Michigan State Police told WWJ. “Down here, heroin in Detroit runs approximately $100 a gram, where up in Traverse City and northern Michigan it runs about $250 a gram. So there’s a huge, almost 150 percent profit that’s being able to come from this area.”

Arrested so far are two females and one male in Metro Detroit. Another 12 warrants will be served Up North on alleged mid-level drug dealers. Seized were heroin, cocaine, marijuana, weapons and prepaid Green Dot debit cards, increasingly used in drug transactions because they are difficult to trace, police said.

“They’ve been planning this for quite some time. There’s a number of people being arrested simultaneously up north, the mid-level dealers, and then these are the major dealers that are coming from the Detroit-area,” Missaukee County Sheriff Jim Bosscher, who chairs the Traverse Narcotics Team, told the radio station.

“This has basically been a historical case, about five years in the making, and what we consider very large amounts of heroin and crack cocaine being trafficked up to northern Michigan,” he said.