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
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