Politics
These Ten States Were Responsible For More Than Half The Marijuana Arrests In The U.S. Last Year
A recently released FBI report shows that more than 200,000 people were arrested marijuana-related offenses in the U.S. last year—and 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.
“Today, the threat of arrest for cannabis possession largely comes down to geography,” NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said. “In nearly half the states in this country, low-level marijuana arrests have fallen nearly to zero. Elsewhere in America, police continue to disrupt hundreds of thousands of lives and waste countless tax dollars and prosecutorial resources on activities that most Americans no longer believe ought to be a crime and that, throughout much of the United States, no longer is.”
Louisiana had the highest percent of total drug arrests accounted for by cannabis possession, at 62 percent. That 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.
NORML’s analysis points out that marijuana arrests have generally decreased significantly in states that have legalized cannabis—though some jurisdictions that have enacted the reform continue to see significant numbers of marijuana busts. Illinois police, for example, reported 5,731 cannabis possession arrests last year, and Washington, D.C. police carried out 1,336 such busts.
Meanwhile, the overall FBI report likely understates the true number of people busted for marijuana, given inconsistencies in the federal data and questions about the agency’s changing methodology from recent years, as well as the fact that about 13 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies did not contribute information for 2025.
The full 2025 data set is based on more than 13 million criminal offenses reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which is used to document and analyze national crime trends. The report covers 96.2 percent of the U.S. population, FBI said.
This latest data shows that cannabis-related offenses increased year over year, jumping to 200,960 marijuana possession busts in 2025 from 187,792 in the year prior, and to 17,192 sales or manufacturing arrests from 16,244 in 2024.
All told, marijuana busts accounted for a quarter of all drug arrests in 2025—more than for any other specifically listed substance—with 92 percent of cannabis incidents stemming from possession alone.
Despite the uptick in marijuana arrests from 2024 to 2025, advocates note that busts have been trending overall downward in recent years, which they attribute largely to the success of the expanding state-level legalization movement.
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 858,852 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 1,492,005 “Drug/Narcotic Offenses” in 2025. Another uses the figure for 1,656,774 under the same heading. A third puts the total at 1,958,377.
Another section says there were 845,031 arrests for drug abuse violations in 2025, accounting for about 11 percent of the approximately 7.5 million estimated arrests nationwide. Other FBI tables say, inconsistently, that there were 754,497 or 768,170 drug abuse violations in 2025.
The FBI data also attempts to show trends over time, indicating that there were 1,157,129 drug offenses charged in 2016 and 645,512 drug offenses charged in 2025—a reduction of about 44 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 408,688 marijuana seizures and 5,378 hashish seizures out of 1,122,990 total drug seizures, representing about 37 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.
