A Kansas man has been sent to federal prison for nearly eight years for possessing bath salts in Nebraska before they specifically were made illegal by state and federal law.

"This is not your run of the mill drug case," Steven Miles Sullivan's attorney, Glenn Shapiro, said at sentencing last week. "He thought he was complying with the law."

That's because when a deputy stopped Sullivan on Oct. 27, 2010, in Otoe County and Sullivan said he had K2 and a bag of bath salts in his vehicle neither was illegal.

Both are now, under both state and federal law.

Still, prosecutors said that at the time of the traffic stop the bath salts violated a federal law that prohibits possessing a "structural analogue" with intent to distribute.

In other words, they were substantially similar to the chemical structure of an illegal, controlled substance and had a substantially similar effect on the human body as the drug they mimicked.

Sullivan was indicted.