Marijuana Arrests by Administration

Executive Summary

There have been over 21.5 million arrests for marijuana law violations since 1970.
(FBI Uniform Crime Reports 1970-2010)
There were 853,838 arrests for marijuana law violations in 2010.
There have been almost 13 million arrests for marijuana law violations since 1992.
Since Bill Clinton's election, Democrats and Republicans have presided over nearly equal arrest totals. (Clinton + Obama = 6.6 million; Bush II = 6.2 million)
Marijuana arrests generally declined from the Ford Administration through the George H. W. Bush Administration, then skyrocketed during the Clinton Administration.

Marijuana Arrests by Administration in the War on Drugs

Click chart for full-size version

The War on Marijuana is a Bipartisan Travesty

Whenever you hear someone talking about the “War on Drugs”, remember to replace the word “Drugs” with “Marijuana”.  This war was declared on June 17, 1971, by President Richard Nixon in an address in which he characterized “drugs” as “Public Enemy Number One” [1], particularly among young people serving in Vietnam.  However, cannabis was the primary illegal drug of those young people at the time.  A Department of Defense survey that year found 30% of enlisted men had used cannabis in the year prior and just 12% had used all other narcotic drugs combined [2].

At the outset of Nixon’s war, marijuana arrests accounted for 45% of all drug arrests [3] and increased 123% over the span of 1970-1973.  President Ford kept marijuana arrests fairly steady. President Carter campaigned on the issue of decriminalizing the personal possession of marijuana [4], but his administration kept the status quo on marijuana arrests.

It became a true “War on Drugs” in the 1980s.  As President Reagan’s wife Nancy began the “Just Say No” campaign, marijuana arrests actually remained steady and, believe it or not, declined slightly by the end of Reagan’s second term. The focus of drug warriors in the Eighties was cocaine [5] and later, crack cocaine and ecstasy. President Bush I continued Reagan's policies and actually recorded the three lowest annual marijuana arrest totals since the declaration of “War on Drugs”.

It was during the administration of President Clinton that we experienced the greatest increase in arrests of cannabis consumers since Nixon.  Despite Clinton becoming the first president to have admitted personal marijuana use [6], in his first term we saw arrests go from 380 thousand annually to 681 thousand and by the end of his second term, the rate of annual marijuana arrests was 115% greater than when he entered the office.

President Bush II kept a slow increase in marijuana arrests, even counting marijuana consumers as enemies in his newly declared “War on Terror” in an infamous 2002 Super Bowl ad [7]. These arrest figures continued to climb even as thousands of Americans were exempted from arrest as state after state legalized medical use of cannabis.

President Obama had campaigned for Senate in 2004 stating “The War on Drugs has been an utter failure... we need to re-think and decriminalize our marijuana laws” [8]. Since then, America has recorded its 20 millionth marijuana arrest during Obama's first term and he has presided over the 2nd- and 3rd-greatest annual marijuana arrest totals in the War on Marijuana.

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Marijuana Arrests, 1970-2010, by Presidential Administration

FBI Uniform Crime Reports (Online 1995-2010) pre-1995 data available in hard copy

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Footnotes

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