Politics
More Than 200,000 People Were Arrested For Marijuana In The U.S. Last Year, FBI Data Shows
Nearly 188,000 people were arrested over marijuana possession in the U.S. last year, according to the FBI’s latest annual crime report, and another 16,000 were booked for allegedly selling or growing cannabis. However, those figures are likely understated given inconsistencies in the federal data and questions about the agency’s methodology.
The full 2024 data set is based on more than 14 million criminal offenses reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which is used to document and analyze national crime trends. The report covers 95.6 percent of the U.S. population, FBI said.
This latest data does show that cannabis-related offenses fell slightly compared to 2023, dropping from 200,306 possession busts to 187,792 in 2024 and from 16,844 sales or manufacturing arrests to 16,244.
Advocates see the reduction as a reflection of the success of the expanding state-level legalization movement, but they also point out that marijuana is still the illegal substance that Americans are most arrested for possessing in the ongoing “war on drugs.”
“While the total number of marijuana-related arrests have fallen nationwide in recent years, it is clear that marijuana-related prosecutions still remain a primary driver of drug war enforcement in the United States,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano told Marijuana Moment.
Of all drug possession arrests in the new report 27 percent were for marijuana—more than for any other specifically listed substance.
Because not all agencies provide complete data for the reporting periods, FBI has explained that the bureau calculates estimated crime numbers, essentially extrapolating “by following a standard estimation procedure using the data provided.” In terms of total reported arrests for a category labelled “drug/narcotic,” for example, FBI said there were 831,446 arrests.
At the same time, frustrations over FBI’s inconsistent data reporting on cannabis and other drug arrest trends have persisted. Various sections of the report provide different numbers for seemingly similar categories of offenses.
One FBI table says that there were 1,413,223 “Drug/Narcotic Offenses” in 2024. Another uses the figure for 1,577,175 under the same heading. A third puts the total at 1,870,804.
Another section says there were 822,488 arrests for drug abuse violations in 2024, accounting for about 12 percent of the approximately 7.5 million estimated arrests nationwide.
The FBI data also shows trends over time, indicating that there were 1,055,013 drug offenses charged in 2015 and 600,400 drug offenses charged in 2024—a reduction of about 43 percent, though it’s not clear how much of the change is due to the agency’s shifting methodology for reporting arrests and how much is due to actual changes in enforcement practices and state drug laws over the past decade.
In terms of controlled substances seized in 2024, the agency said were 386,540 marijuana seizures out of 1,072,704 total drug seizures, representing about 36 percent of enforcement actions.
FBI’s arrest data is widely relied on by lawmakers, researchers and media to understand and contextualize law enforcement trends. Any inconsistencies influence not just the public’s understanding of crime and law enforcement, but also potentially how policy is crafted and implemented.
Apparent errors in FBI marijuana were pointed out to the bureau in May 2022, when a longtime drug reformer and former congressional staffer, Eric Sterling, claimed to have discovered that a Maryland police department was reporting cannabis possession citations issued under the state’s decriminalization law at the time as arrests as part of a data-sharing partnership with FBI.
Since other state and local law enforcement agencies appear to not be reporting cannabis citations as arrests, Sterling reasoned, the inconsistent practice could significantly alter FBI’s annual reports—making it harder to draw reasonable policy conclusions from the data.
In 2023—about 14 months after Sterling sent the inquiry—the office finally replied. Rather than address the apparent problem, however, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General’s investigations division said it had “determined that the matters that you raised are more appropriate for review by another office within the DOJ” and referred the inquiry to FBI’s own inspection division.
FBI’s cannabis enforcement reporting is also compromised by the fact that local and state police are not required to share data to inform the agency’s annual report, meaning it offers an incomplete overview of national law enforcement activities. The agency itself says that certain data may not be comparable to previous years because of different levels of participation over time.
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Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said in a recent filing that the marijuana rescheduling process remains stalled at the stage it has been on for months, despite the head of agency’s prior commitment to senators that he would prioritize the issue if confirmed for the role.
President Donald Trump said in August that he intended to make a decision on the proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) within weeks.
Rescheduling would not federally legalize marijuana, however, so it remains to be seen how such a reform might impact arrest rates included in the FBI’s future annual reports.
