Federal marijuana arrests have been reduced significantly as the cannabis legalization movement is continuing to spread, according to new data by the Department of Justice (DOJ).
In 2010, marijuana accounted for more arrests by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) than all other drugs with the sole exception of cocaine. Ten years later, in 2020, marijuana accounted for the least number of arrests, completely inverting the trend. “During that period, arrests declined an average of 11% for marijuana each year,” the DOJ’s report reads.
The report does not include the year 2021, during which there was an unexpected uptick in marijuana-related arrests and busts by the DEA, bringing the number of arrestees from less than 5,000 to 6,606. That year, the DEA’s enforcement zeal ran counter to all other metrics, which clearly show a rapid and consistent decrease in prohibition of cannabis.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission revealed that marijuana cases shrank quickly among federal drug cases, with less than 1,000 federal marijuana charges filed in 2021. The FBI’s arrest data shows a sharp decline in arrests for cannabis: Just between 2019 and 2020, cannabis-related arrests declined 36% throughout all of the United States and every level of law enforcement.
Interestingly, even after such a precipitous decline in arrests over a period of nearly 10 years, arrests for minor marijuana offenses, mainly simple possession of personal use amounts of weed, are still more numerous than arrests for all violent crimes combined.
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