Another 5.2 percent of arrests, or approximately 81,000 arrests, were made for marijuana sale or manufacturing.
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“Could you imagine if hundreds of thousands of adults were arrested past year simply for possessing alcohol?”
In comparison, there were 693,482 marijuana arrests in the U.S.in 2013. And that number is an undercount, because a handful of states either don’t report arrest numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or do so only on a limited basis.
Cannabis arrests are slightly up from 2013 despite the fact that American attitudes continue to become more supportive of legalization, according to polls. “A record number of states are expected to vote on legalizing marijuana next year, so we hope and expect to see these numbers significantly dropping soon”.
Voters in a number of states may consider legalization measures at the ballot in 2016, including Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Missouri and Nevada. More than a third of murders went unsolved in 2014, for example.
What is most alarming, however, is that the majority of these arrests were not attributed to hardcore drug trafficking operations, but for simple possession.
Kevin Sabet, president of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, says the uptick may be because more people are using marijuana.
As in previous years, marijuana possession arrests were most likely to occur in the midwest and in the southeastern regions of the United States. “All it shows is that in a few places law enforcement is overzealously enforcing marijuana policy”. Spending even a night in jail and then being forced to contend with a drug possession charge puts a financial strain on hard working Americans, making it difficult for them to maintain employment and costing them thousands of dollars in fines and court fees.
There’s still a long way to go on the issue of reforming marijuana laws to address the root of these problems, according to Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project.
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In the two states (Colorado and Washington) that have legalized marijuana-related activities, cannabis-related arrests plummeted in 2014 – indicating that that other jurisdictions are prioritizing arrests at a time when the majority of the public is opposed to criminalization.
