The fallout from a party in November at which Michael Phelps was photographed using a marijuana pipe included eight arrests Saturday, lawyers for two of the eight people said Thursday.

According to the two lawyers, Richard Harpootlian and Joseph McCulloch, a dozen officers executed two search warrants  one on their clients’ former house, where the party took place, and another on the house where their clients currently live  and discovered a small amount of marijuana. The lawyers were sharply critical after the arrests, arguing that the investigation by the sheriff’s department in Richland County, S.C., has been an excessive allocation of resources fueled by Phelps’s celebrity status.

“They interrogated my client and Mr. McCulloch’s client, not about where they got the marijuana, not about marijuana dealing in Columbia, but about whether they had been at the party in November with Phelps,” Harpootlian said. “Did they see him smoking marijuana? Did they know anything about drug use by him?”

Phelps’s agent, Drew Johnson, said that neither he nor Phelps had been contacted in connection with the arrests. Implicating Phelps would require the testimony of several witnesses, McCulloch said, because a photograph of him holding a pipe would not be substantial enough to stand up in court.