Politics
In These Six States, More Than Half Of All Drug Arrests Were For Marijuana
The so-called “war on drugs” is mostly a war on marijuana in several U.S. states, according to a new analysis of FBI data.
Last year, over half of all drug arrests were for cannabis in Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska and Wisconsin, the review by the pro-legalization advocacy group NORML shows.
“In many prohibition states, a significant portion of law enforcement and prosecutorial resources are still being directed toward arresting tens of thousands of cannabis consumers for activities that are now perfectly legal in nearly half of this country,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said.
Louisiana had the highest percent of total drug arrests accounted for by cannabis possession, at 62 percent.
The state’s governor recently signed legislation that threatens to send people to jail for up to one year if they smoke marijuana within 2,000 feet of a school property—including a college campus.
In Idaho, 55 percent of drug arrests were for cannabis.
The governor there signed legislation last year setting a $300 mandatory minimum fine for marijuana possession. Advocates attempted to get a measure to legalize medical cannabis on this November’s ballot, but they fell short. Voters will decide on a separate proposed constitutional amendment, however, to make it so that only lawmakers could legalize cannabis or other controlled substances in the future.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers (D) and Democratic lawmakers have pushed to legalize marijuana but those proposals have been blocked by the legislature’s Republican majority. A limited medical cannabis bill did clear one committee this session, but did not advance further.
In four other states—Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi and Wyoming—as well as in Washington, D.C., just below half of all drug busts in 2025 were focused on marijuana.
Marijuana possession and home cultivation is legal in D.C., but that didn’t stop police from making almost 1,600 cannabis busts last year. That’s more than twice as many as in 2024 and more than four times the number of marijuana arrests in the nation’s capital in 2023, NORML said. Most of the busts were for public use, which is still illegal.
Armentano of NORML said that cannabis arrests are “a tremendous waste of time and money, and it is a unnecessarily destructive and disruptive policy for those directly impacted by it.”
“Low-level marijuana offenders, many of them younger, poor, and people of color, should not be saddled with an arrest, a criminal record and with the lifelong penalties and stigma associated with it for engaging in behavior that most Americans nationwide no longer believe ought to be a crime,” he said.
The overall FBI data shows that more than 200,000 people were arrested marijuana-related offenses in the U.S. last year. A separate recent analysis from NORML showed that more than half of those cannabis busts were made by police in just ten states.
Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana and Alabama police carried out more than 131,000 marijuana arrests in 2025, according to a new analysis of the federal data from NORML.
That’s about 60 percent of the nationwide total.
Texas alone saw more than 29,000 cannabis arrests last year—accounting for about 14 percent of the nation’s marijuana busts—with 98 percent of those being for possession alone.
Police in North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin each reported more than 12,000 marijuana arrests last year—all with 90 percent or more for possession only.
