State and local police made at least 218,152 marijuana-related arrests in 2025, including 200,960 for possession, which accounted for about 23% of all drug arrests nationwide. The true total may be higher because roughly 13% of law-enforcement agencies did not report arrest data to the FBI and some cannabis cases may be included among unspecified drug violations.
The FBI has published new data on arrests by state and local law enforcement across the US. The numbers are in: 218,152 people were arrested for marijuana-related offenses in 2025 alone. You read that right: in a country where medical cannabis is legal in most states, where a multibillion-dollar industry has grown around the plant, where industry executives are helping shape presidential cannabis policy, and where most Americans believe it should already be legal, hundreds of thousands of people are losing their freedom for simply having weed on them. Not for selling it, not for manufacturing it, not for violence: for possession.
If one were feeling generous, one might think that perhaps most of those arrests involved violence or evidence of intent to sell. But that’s not the case: only 17,192 of the arrests were categorized as “sales/manufacturing.” The other 200,960—that is, 92%—were for “low-level marijuana possession,” which typically involves small amounts for personal use. Possession arrests alone represent about 23% of all drug-related arrests nationwide, which totaled 858,852 in 2025. To put that figure in perspective, 200,960 arrests amount to roughly one every three minutes in the Land of the Free.
In fact, the actual number might be much higher: as NORML points out, about 13% of law enforcement agencies failed to report their data to the Bureau. In addition, there are tens of thousands of “unspecified drug abuse violations” in the report, which might include weed possession among them. All this without taking into account that the FBI has repeatedly changed its methodology over the years, making official figures harder to interpret and comparisons with previous years more difficult.
Surprising exactly no one, Texas leads the way when it comes to arresting people for small amounts of weed. From January to December 2025, 29,690 people were arrested for cannabis-related offenses,of whom 97.5% were charged with simple possession. Other states where the plant remains illegal also reported five-figure arrest totals. Specifically, Georgia arrested 12,247 people, North Carolina 12,733, Pennsylvania 12,238, Tennessee 12,099, Wisconsin 12,050, South Carolina 11,754, and Indiana 10,313. Together, these eight states accounted for more than half of all cannabis-related arrests nationwide.
States with legal weed show comparatively modest numbers, often remaining below 1,000. New York, for instance, reported only 719 possession arrests in 2025. Vermont gets the prize for the fewest arrests, with only 16 that whole year.
As NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano puts it, “it is clear that marijuana-related prosecutions still remain a primary driver of drug war enforcement in the United States. The 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. Low-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.”
