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More than 200,000 people were arrested for possessing marijuana in the U.S. last year, according to the FBI\u2019s latest annual crime report, and another 17,000 were booked for allegedly selling or growing cannabis.<\/p>\n
Those figures likely understate the true number of people busted for marijuana, however, given inconsistencies in the federal data and questions about the agency\u2019s changing methodology from recent years, as well as the fact that about 13 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies did not contribute data for 2025.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 The report covers 96,2 percent of the U.S. population, FBI said.<\/p>\n
This latest data shows that cannabis-related offenses increased year over year<\/a>, jumping to 200,960 marijuana possession busts in 2025 from 187,792 in the year prior, and to\u00a017,192 sales or manufacturing arrests from 16,244 in 2024.<\/p>\n All told, marijuana busts accounted for a quarter of all drug arrests in 2025\u2014more than for any other specifically listed substance\u2014with 92 percent of cannabis incidents stemming from possession alone.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the number of marijuana-related arrests has trended downward for the better part of the past decade, in large part due to 24 states legalizing and regulating cannabis for adults, it is clear that marijuana-related prosecutions still remain a primary driver of drug war enforcement in the United States,\u201d Paul Armentano, deputy director for NORML, said. \u201cHundreds of thousands of Americans continue to be arrested annually for low-level cannabis-related violations even though a majority of voters no longer believe that the responsible use of marijuana by adults should be a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe criminalization of cannabis and the prosecution of those who possess it and consume it is a terribly destructive policy that disrupts lives and has lasting consequences,\u201d he said. \u201cLow-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 is legally regulated in nearly half the states in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n Because not all agencies provide complete data for the reporting periods, FBI has explained that the bureau calculates estimated crime numbers, essentially extrapolating \u201cby following a standard estimation procedure using the data provided.\u201d In terms of total reported arrests for a category labelled \u201cdrug\/narcotic,\u201d for example, FBI said there were 858,852 arrests.<\/p>\n At the same time, frustrations over FBI\u2019s inconsistent data<\/a> reporting<\/a> on cannabis and other drug arrest trends have persisted. Various sections of the report provide different numbers for seemingly similar categories of offenses.<\/p>\n One FBI table says that there were 1,492,005 \u201cDrug\/Narcotic Offenses\u201d in 2025. Another uses the figure for 1,656,774 under the same heading. A third puts the total at 1,958,377.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014a reduction of about 44 percent, though it\u2019s not clear how much of the change is due to the agency\u2019s shifting methodology for reporting arrests and how much is due to actual changes in enforcement practices and state drug laws over the past decade.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n FBI\u2019s 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\u2019s understanding of crime and law enforcement, but also potentially how policy is crafted and implemented.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0reporting cannabis possession citations issued under the state\u2019s decriminalization law at the time as arrests<\/a>\u00a0as part of a data-sharing partnership with FBI.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s annual reports\u2014making it harder to draw reasonable policy conclusions from the data.<\/p>\n In 2023\u2014about 14 months after Sterling sent the inquiry\u2014the office finally replied. Rather than address the apparent problem, however, the Department of Justice\u2019s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General\u2019s investigations division said it had \u201cdetermined that the matters that you raised are more appropriate for review by another office within the DOJ\u201d and\u00a0referred the inquiry to FBI\u2019s own inspection division<\/a>.<\/p>\n FBI\u2019s cannabis enforcement reporting is also compromised by the fact that local and state police are not required to share data to inform the agency\u2019s annual report, meaning it\u00a0offers an incomplete overview of national law enforcement activities<\/a>. The agency itself says that certain data may not be comparable to previous years because of different levels of participation over time.<\/p>\n \u2014 The new FBI arrest data comes at the Trump administration is moving forward with the process of federally rescheduling marijuana.<\/p>\n Attorney General Todd Blanche in April\u00a0issued an order that immediately reclassified state-licensed medical cannabis<\/a>, as well as marijuana products approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III.<\/p>\n Under a separate order the acting attorney general signed, a hearing is considering more comprehensively moving marijuana to Schedule III.<\/p>\n The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which is charged with defending the proposed rescheduling move, said in its final brief filed last week that \u201cmarijuana no longer fits the statutory requirements for Schedule I<\/a> because it has a currently accepted medical use within the United States and it has an accepted safety for its use under medical supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n The agency noted that under the law it must give \u201csignificant deference\u201d to an \u201cextensive ten-month study on the scientific and medical properties\u201d of cannabis conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which recommended rescheduling.<\/p>\n \u201cCurrently there are over 30,000 practitioners treating more than six million patients in 43 U.S. jurisdictions,\u201d DEA said. \u201cSuch practices demonstrate that there is no longer a lack of accepted safety for use of marijuana under medical supervision, and as such, marijuana does not fulfill the requirements of being a Schedule I substance.\u201d<\/p>\n It also said that there is \u201csubstantial evidence sufficient to show that marijuana\u2019s abuse and dependency profiles better align with Schedule III substances than Schedule II\u201d or Schedule I. \u201cThe vast majority of individuals who use marijuana do so in a manner that does not result in dangers to themselves or to their communities.\u201d<\/p>\n In conclusion, DEA asked the judge overseeing the hearing to \u201cexpeditiously recommend\u201d that marijuana be transferred from Schedule I to Schedule III.<\/p>\n The post More Than 200,000 People Were Arrested For Marijuana Possession In The U.S. Last Year, FBI Data Shows<\/a> appeared first on Marijuana Moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n
More than 200,000 people were arrested for possessing marijuana in the U.S. last year, according to the FBI\u2019s latest annual crime report, and another 17,000 were booked for allegedly selling or growing cannabis. Those figures likely understate the true number of people busted for marijuana, however, given inconsistencies in theContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":86732,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86733,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86731\/revisions\/86733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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