For the second straight year under President Obama, more people are arrested for marijuana than all other drugs combined.

The 2010 FBI Uniform Crime Report has been released today and for the second year in a row, marijuana arrests make up a majority of all arrests in the “War on Drugs”.

The actual data table from the FBI UCR 2010 for all drug arrests

Nationally, there were 1,638,846 drug arrests reported to the FBI, with 52.1% of those arrests for marijuana charges.  Last year, 51.6% of all drug arrests were for marijuana, showing a slight increase in marijuana as the majority of all drug arrests.  The last time marijuana made up a majority of the “War on Drugs” was 1985, when 55.6% of all drug arrests were for marijuana.

Over 21 million marijuana arrests and counting...

These 853,839 marijuana arrests represent a drop of 4,569 arrests for marijuana as compared to the previous year.  However, arrests for all other drugs dropped by 20,167, or almost four-and-a-half times fewer drug arrests than marijuana arrests compared to a year ago.  Keep in mind these arrests increase or remain virtually steady while state after state legalizes medical use of marijuana and decriminalizes recreational marijuana, removing millions of cannabis users from the pool of potential marijuana arrests.

Marijuana is NORML in America

Meanwhile, arrests for violent crime have decreased for the fifth straight year, to just 552,077 arrests for “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault”.  The last time there were so few arrests for violent crime was, coincidentally, 1985.  Fewer violent crime arrests would be welcome if not for the fact that there were more violent crimes reported to police.  2010 had the most violent crimes reported to police in a decade (1,246,248), with only 44.3% of violent crimes reported leading to an arrest.

Geographically, the Midwest usually makes headlines for the devastating epidemic of methamphetamine manufacture and abuse.  However, 63.5% of all drug arrests in the Midwest are for marijuana use (53.9%) and cultivation (9.6%).  The South also makes more arrests for marijuana possession (51.5%) than any other drug charge.

The FBI Uniform Crime Report shows marijuana arrests increased by 10,000 to the 2nd highest-levels ever recorded

The 2009 FBI Uniform Crime Report has been released.  Last year’s report showed a decrease of nearly 25,000 from 2007, but this year we find marijuana arrests increased by over 10,000 to 858,408, the 2nd-highest total ever recorded.

Over the eight-year period of the George W. Bush Administration, state and federal governments arrested over 6.4 million marijuana users, sellers, and growers.  Over the span of the Clinton Administration, another 4.9 million were arrested.  However, Mr. Clinton’s administration fueled the massive increase in marijuana arrests, starting with only 381,000 as he took office and ending with 724,000 as he left, an increase of over 90%.  Mr. Bush, while maintaining arrests between 700,000 and 900,000, only increased the arrests by over 18%.

Marijuana IS the drug war - almost 52% of all drug war arrests are for marijuana

For the first time ever recorded, marijuana now makes up more than half of all drug arrests – 51.6%.  Overall drug arrests actually declined by 2.29% over the past year and have seen a steady five-year decline from 1.84 million arrests in 2005 to 1.66 million in 2009, an overall decline of almost 10%

Meanwhile, marijuana arrests increased this year by 1.24% and have increased over 9% from the 2005 total of 786,545.  Marijuana possession makes up 88% of all marijuana arrests – or just about 7 in 8 people busted for pot are just smoking it, not selling or growing it.  By comparison, 6 in 8 people busted for all other drugs are users, not sellers or manufacturers.

Does arresting pot smokers make violent crime decrease... or does more people smoking pot make violent crime decrease?

As drug arrests have increased steadily over the past two decades, violent crime has decreased in America.  The rate of violent crime in 1995 was 684.5 crimes per 100,000 people and now it has decreased to 429.4, the lowest rate ever recorded.  Compared to violent offenses known, police seem to make an arrest in 42%-44% of all violent crimes.

This has led to only 582,000 arrests for violent crime, also the lowest number recorded.  Since 1998 there have been more arrests for marijuana than violent crime and since 2000 there have been more arrests for marijuana possession than violent crime (save 2002).

As marijuana use has gone up, violent crimes have gone down. Coincidence?

Since arrests for drugs other than marijuana have dropped 10% in five years as violent crime arrests have dropped, we suppose one could argue that locking up more potheads has brought down violent crime… if one was ignorant enough to believe cannabis consumers are some great source of crime and violence.

We believe – and studies confirm – that cannabis use does not lead the user to commit violent acts (but that legal drug, alcohol, sure does!)  As we’ve seen the ranks of monthly marijuana users swell from 10 million to 15 million since 1991, we’ve also seen violent crime drop both overall and from a rate of 758.2 to 429.4 per 100,000 persons.

How many more murderers, rapists, batterers, thieves, molesters, burglars, frauds, cheats, and vandals would our police forces have time to investigate and our courts have time to prosecute if they weren’t spending nine hours on every marijuana possession offense?

But wait, I thought the Stoners Against Legalization told me that marijuana was already legal in California?

(California NORML) According to data from the Bureau of Criminal Statistics, California reported nearly the same number of marijuana arrests in 2009 as in the previous, record year.

In 2009, there were 17,008 felony and 61,164 misdemeanor marijuana arrests, for a total of 78,172. In 2008, there were 17,126 felonies and 61,388 misdemeanors, for a total of 78,514. This was the highest number of arrests since marijuana was decriminalized in 1976.

Arrests for other drugs have been declining. Narcotics (heroin & cocaine) arrests plummeted to 43,956, down 17% since last year. Arrests for dangerous drugs have fallen 33% since 2006.

A bill to make possession of less than one ounce of marijuana an infraction rather than a misdemeanor, SB 1449 by Sen. Mark Leno, is currently headed to the Governor’s desk. The bill would result in some 60,000 fewer misdemeanor cases, saving the state millions of dollars in court & prosecution costs.

The FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2008 has been released today and the numbers provide us with a few good news / bad news scenarios to report.

Marijuana Arrests 1990-2008

Good news: Marijuana arrests have declined from the previous year.  For the first time since 2002 (and only the 5th time since 1990), there were fewer marijuana arrests in America than the previous year.  Last year, there were 872,721 arrests for marijuana*; this year the figure has dropped to 847,864, a decline of 2.85%.

Bad news: There were 847,864 arrests for marijuana last year, the second-highest total of marijuana arrests ever recorded.  This is two-and-a-half times more arrests for pot than in 1990.  There were more pot arrests than people living in South Dakota.

Good news:  This year, arrests for “drug abuse violations” declined overall, from 1.84 million in 2007 to 1.70 million in 2008.  The proportion of drug arrests to all arrests also dropped, from 13% of all arrests in 2007 to 12.2% of all arrests in 2008.

Half of the "War on Drugs" is a War on Marijuana

Bad news: The number of marijuana arrests as a proportion of all “drug abuse violation” arrests increased from 47% to 49.8% – half of all drug arrests are for selling, manufacturing, or possessing marijuana.  In the Midwest and South, over half of all drug abuse violation arrests were just for possession of marijuana.

Good news: Police seem to be doing a better job on violent crime.  In 2008, here were only 2,500 fewer arrests for homicide, rape, robbery, and assault than 2007.  There were fewer incidents of violent crime in 2008 (1.22 million in 2007, 1.20 million in 2008) and better clearance of violent crimes (44.5% led to arrest in 2007, 45.1% led to arrest in 2008).

Bad news: 89% of all the marijuana arrests were for possession only, meaning there were 754,224 arrests for personal use of marijuana, not selling or cultivating.  The arrests for sales or cultivation of marijuana that make up 11% of all marijuana arrests include those who were growing their own for personal use and medical marijuana grows.  By comparison, there were only 594,911 arrests for the 1.22 million violent crimes committed in America.

Good news: While the number of adults who admit using marijuana in the past year increased by half a million, from 22 million in 2007 to 22.5 million in 2008, the number of arrests for marijuana declined by almost 25,000.  This means now there are 37.46 arrests-per-1000-annual-tokers in 2008 vs. 39.67 in 2007.  This works out to one marijuana arrest every 37 seconds in 2008, rather than every 36 seconds in 2007.

Bad news: The percentage of people under age 18 arrested for “drug abuse violations” remains unchanged at 10.6% of all drug arrests.

*Trying to break the habit of writing “842,864 people arrested”, because these arrests figures could include one person who was arrested multiple times.

(LA Times) According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), the arrest rate for all offenses in California sank by 40% from 1990 to 2008, with arrests for rape and murder falling by more than 60% each. Drug possession arrests for everything but marijuana collectively fell by nearly 30% in the same period. Meanwhile, arrests for marijuana possession have skyrocketed — up 127%. This rise in marijuana arrests is the ultimate outlier.

California made a major step toward decriminalizing low-level pot possession in 1975, when it made possession of less than an ounce a misdemeanor punishable with a fine and no jail time. That didn’t stop law enforcement from arresting more than 74,000 people last year — the highest number since the 1975 law took effect. More than 80% of those arrests were for misdemeanor possession, the lowest-level offense.

Not surprisingly, given the way drug laws are traditionally enforced in this country, the burden has fallen disproportionately on people of color, and on young black men in particular. According to the CJCJ, half of California’s marijuana possession arrestees were nonwhite in 1990 and 28% were under age 20. Last year, 62% were nonwhite and 42% were under age 20. Marijuana possession arrests of youth of color rose from about 3,100 in 1990 to about 16,300 in 2008 — an arrest surge 300% greater than the rate of population growth in that group.

Even more disturbing, African Americans account for an even higher portion of all marijuana felony arrests. Blacks make up less than 7% of the state population but 22% of people arrested for all marijuana offenses and 33% of all marijuana felony arrests. More African Americans are arrested in California for marijuana felonies than are whites, even though whites are six times more represented in the state population.

The overrepresentation of African Americans is not explained by use rates. According to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the percentage of African Americans and whites who use marijuana over any 30-day period are similar. However, for the 18-25 age group — which constitutes a substantial proportion of marijuana arrests — African Americans regularly use marijuana at rates lower than whites (16.5% and 18.4%, respectively), indicating that their overrepresentation may be even more profound.

These statistics would be shocking if one wasn’t aware of the roots of marijuana prohibition.  It has always been about harassing and controlling the “undesirable” populations from the moment the first anti-Mexican immigrant pot prohibitions were passed a century ago in El Paso.  The term “marihuana” itself is Mexican slang, used to give the innocuous-sounding hemp plant a more evil-sounding name.  As black jazz musicians popularized marijuana use in the ’20s and ’30s, yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst and first “drug czar” Harry J. Anslinger were quick to leverage racism in their demonization of a plant:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. … Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” — Harry J. Anslinger, America’s 1st Drug Czar (FDR – JFK)

“Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him…. Marihuana influences Negroes to to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.” — William Randolph Hearst, Newspaper Tycoon (1936)

Lest you think that kind of talk died out after Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s, check out President Nixon’s rationalization for the War on Drugs, first from the Nixon Tapes, and second as explained to Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman (from Halderman’s diaries):

“I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana, I mean one that just tears the ass out of them. You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish…. You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.” — Richard M. Nixon, Former US President

Well lookee what I’ve gone and made. It’s a handy-dandy 160×300 widget to display on your blog, MySpace, or Facebook that shows you how much we are wasting in our insane crusade against a plant.

In the mid-late 1990s Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Chief William Bratton focused on arresting and detaining people for crimes that contributed to a lower “quality-of-life” in New York City. This aggressive arrest policy (AAP) resulted in a record growth in marijuana arrests. In 1992, the number of marijuana arrests was around 5,000. By 2000, the arrest rate hit an all-time high of about 60,000 (the large majority of which were for misdemeanor arrests in both years). Through a triangulation of data sources, including the Uniform Crime Reports and the Treatment Episode Data Set from 1992 to 2003, and other published accounts, this paper shows that entries into treatment for marijuana dramatically increased in New York City at the same time as misdemeanor and felony arrests for marijuana also rose. 

via Marijuana Treatment Entries Did Not Decrease After Aggressive Arrest Policies Were Implemented in New York City.

Good so far, right?  Matches up nicely with that graph there showing that 1992-2000, marijuana arrests increased 1000% and so did court referrals for marijuana “treatment”.  After 9/11 as arrests declined, referrals began to decline.  Shows what we’ve been saying for a while now, that few people actually seek professional drug rehab for marijuana alone; most are forced into it after being arrested for marijuana possession.

Well, not to Dr. Kevin Sabet:

While it is unclear if these arrests caused the treatment increase (vis-à-vis criminal justice referral programs), the presence of these two phenomena show that policy regimes of increased treatment and increased law enforcement actions can co-exist. The oft-heard phrase “treatment versus law enforcement” may represent a false dichotomy in drug policy analysis.

Unclear?!?  You think 1000% more pot smokers just up and decided they were marijuana “addicts” and voluntarily sought treatment?  Could this paper get any sillier?  (Yes.  Yes it can.)

The purpose of this paper is to document that increases in law enforcement intensity in New York City were not tantamount to decreases in treatment delivery among marijuana and other drug users. The argument that treatment and incarceration work separately as opposing and competing strategies is one of the most repeated dichotomies used in the drug policy discourse (e.g. Zimmer & Morgan, 1997; Drug Policy Alliance, 2007; Blendon &Young, 1998; Justice Policy Institute, 2006; Real Reform New York, 2005;Schneider Institute for Health Policy, 2001). The activist-phrase “treatment over incarceration” or “treatment versus incarceration” is an accepted term within the drug policy discourse.

Indeed, this paper suggests that law enforcement intensity may be one of many different activities that couldincrease treatment entry.

Dr. Sabet, when we argue “treatment over incarceration”, we are arguing that a criminal justice solution — arresting addicts — is counterproductive because forcing them into treatment doesn’t work.  Yes, if you arrest people and sentence them to treatment, surprise! you’ll get more people into treatment!  But remember the old joke — the light bulb has to want to change.

My father, after 25 years of drug addiction, voluntarily went through treatment.  He’s been sober now as long as he was an addict, 25 years.  Following treatment, he returned to school, got a social work degree, and became a drug addiction counselor.  One of the things he hated most in his program were addicts that were sentenced to be there by a judge.  Those addicts didn’t want to change; they wanted to mark time in the program until they could get out and use again.  He was frustrated that plenty of addicts who wanted treatment couldn’t get bedspace because of all the sentenced addicts in the program who didn’t want to be.  They were combative, belligerent, and not only took the time and space a repentant addict could have used, but made treatment more difficult for the non-sentenced addicts in the program.

On the national policy level, it means that perhaps drug arrests can accompany an atmosphere of increased health services delivery in the form of treatment for drug users. … Indeed, many criminal justice practitioners believe that court mandates can “motivate” otherwise “unwilling” addict offenders into treatment (Wexler, Lipton, & Johnson, 1988). Those mandated to treatment are no less likely to be successful in reducing their drug use and crime rates than those entering treatment voluntarily.

And those mandated to treatment are no more likely to be successful, either, while souring the treatment experience for those around them.  Drug treatment facilities are one of the few places in modern healthcare where your actual results aren’t measured and industry-wide standards are non-existent:

(NY Times) Many clinics across the county have waiting lists, and researchers estimate that some 20 million Americans who could benefit from treatment do not get it.

Yet very few rehabilitation programs have the evidence to show that they are effective. The resort-and-spa private clinics generally do not allow outside researchers to verify their published success rates. The publicly supported programs spend their scarce resources on patient care, not costly studies.

And the field has no standard guidelines. Each program has its own philosophy; so, for that matter, do individual counselors. No one knows which approach is best for which patient, because these programs rarely if ever track clients closely after they graduate. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, the best known of all the substance-abuse programs, does not publish data on its participants’ success rate.

Of course, the real underlying false premise here is that someone arrested for possession of marijuana in New York City is an addict in need of rehabilitation.  I’m all for someone getting treatment for a marijuana dependence if that has caused problems in your life.  If you’re skipping school, doing poorly at work, or messing up your relationships because you can’t put down the bong, by all means, get thee into treatment!  But if you smoke responsibly, work hard, pay taxes, play by the rules (well, except that rule) and a judge declares your personality to be defective and in need of re-education because a cop caught you smoking pot, you’re not the kind of person who needs rehab, you just need tips on how not to get caught.

I see Dr. Sabet’s analysis as a justification for government subsidization of the treatment industry.  According to the US Government’s Dept. of Health & Human Services DASIS, 289,988 tokers were admitted to drug treatment facilities in 2006.  Only 15% of tokers admitted themselves to treatment; 58% of tokers were forced there by the criminal justice system.  What business wouldn’t want government to force 168,193 of its customers through the door?  Compare that to heroin, the next highest non-alcohol drug treatment population with 245,984 admitted users, and you find the numbers reversed: 59% of junkies admitted themselves to treatment; 14% of junkies were forced there by the criminal justice system.  Tokers forced by the criminal justice system into treatment make up 9.3% of ALL drug treatment admissions in the United States and 24.6% of all drug users forced into rehab.  By contrast, tokers only make up 7.4% of all drug users who choose to go into rehab.

I don’t mean this rant to disrespect drug treatment.  As I mentioned above, my father would be dead without inpatient drug rehab… but that’s because he was hooked on alcohol and speed, not weed.  If even one serious alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or speed addict who can afford and desires drug treatment is turned away because his bed is taken by a court-sentenced pot smoker, that’s one too many.

States ponder early release for prisoners – Economy in Turmoil- msnbc.com
NEW YORK – Their budgets in crisis, governors, legislators and prison officials across the nation are making or considering policy changes that will likely remove tens of thousands of offenders from prisons and parole supervision.

In California, faced with a projected $42 billion deficit and prison overcrowding that has triggered a federal lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000. He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates — steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.

In Kentucky, where the inmate population had been soaring, even some murderers and other violent offenders are benefiting from a temporary cost-saving program that has granted early release to nearly 2,000 inmates.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is proposing early release of about 1,000 inmates. New York Gov. David Paterson wants early release for 1,600 inmates as well as an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.

Here’s an idea: how about you stop arresting so many of those non-violent drug offenders in the first place?  Based on the numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2007:

• California arrested 289,449 people for drugs
• Kentucky arrested 11,883 people for drugs
• Virginia arrested 32,941 people for drugs
• New York arrested 61,163 people for drugs

Now if it is too scary to think about not arresting the users of all illegal drugs, let’s narrow it down to cannabis.  The FBI didn’t give me state-level breakdowns of cannabis arrests, but nationwide cannabis accounts for 47% of all drug arrests.  For the four states mentioned, that’s 185,854 cannabis arrests, and since 89% of those are possession-only arrests, that’s 165,410 otherwise law-abiding pot smokers arrested – not growers, traffickers, or dealers, just tokers.

To be fair, most of these 165,410 don’t spend much more than their booking time in a jail.  But it still takes time, money, and space to prosecute them and that begins to add up.  If these four states mentioned just taxed and regulated cannabis like Jagermeister, combined they’d raise $1.9 billion every year.  That wouldn’t completely solve these states’ budget crises, but it sure would keep a few more actual criminals behind bars.

California sees nearly 75,000 marijuana arrests in 2007 – Times-Standard Online
The nearly 75,000 marijuana-related arrests in California last year are prompting marijuana law reform activists to say that laws aren’t stopping people from getting what they want, while local law enforcement responds that the increased number of arrests is simply the result of tighter enforcement.

According to the state Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center, 74,119 felony and misdemeanor marijuana arrests were made in 2007, a jump of nearly 10,000 arrests from 2006, which saw 65,386.

Between 2001 and 2006, the differences from year to year were much smaller.

In Humboldt County alone, more people are getting arrested, and more of those arrested are getting charged with serious crimes.

The number of marijuana-related arrests in Humboldt nearly doubled between 2006 and 2007, jumping from 564 to 971. In 2006, 138 people were charged with marijuana felonies, while in 2007 that number ballooned to 550. Meanwhile, the number of marijuana misdemeanors between the two years has stayed roughly the same.

[California NORML's Dale] Gieringer said the statewide numbers are the highest since 1990, which he says is a sign that these arrests are only wasting taxpayer money.

Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos said while there may be some legitimate reasons to legalize marijuana, increased arrests is not one of them.

”I don’t think the increased arrest is any indication that this needs to be legalized,” he said. “It’s no more than if murder went up that we should legalize murder.”

Yes, because growing marijuana for adults who want it is just like taking someone’s life.  Pot farming is a lot like murder.  Yeah, that’s it.

It’s like arguing with junior high school kids sometimes.  ”Well, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?  Huh?”  Well, I don’t know.  Do my friends all survive?  Is it a bridge over a lake?  Who knows, maybe they all die and I’m so distraught I jump off the bridge, too.  Are we really going to have a meaningful conversation if you’re hypothesizing about mass bridge suicides or comparing breaking pot laws to killing people?

I’ve heard this argument from actual adults, that you don’t legalize marijuana just because it’s impossible to stamp out, any more than you don’t legalize rape because it’s impossible to stamp out, that just because people will always commit a certain crime, that doesn’t mean you stop punishing people for it.

Where this argument fails the common sense test is that rational people can understand that there are crimes of the “broke a rule” category and crimes of the “sins against humanity” category.  Nobody really needs a written statute to understand that murder, rape, and robbery are crimes of the “sin” category – you are directly harming another and there is an identifiable victim.

But cannabis possession and cultivation are crimes in definition only.  Both the provider and the consumer want to engage in the activity which affects no one but them.  They’ll try to make the argument of indirect harm, that the pot smokers cause injuries, broken homes, loss of productivity, crime, whatever, but each of those arguments is either bogus or attributable to prohibition, not the plant.  And the indirect harm argument is a nice slippery slope that leads to banning cigarettes, alcohol, trans-fats, high-fructose corn syrup, and cars — all of those cause more indirect harm to society than a doobie.

Keep in mind that marijuana smoking is not illegal in the US — possession of marijuana is illegal.  You will be arrested for that plant whether you smoke it or not.  If you’ve smoked it and have no more of the plant, there is no crime to charge you with.

But not only that, the plant itself, absent possession by anyone, is illegal.  The cops will spend lots of time and money ripping up wild marijuana plants that belong to no one.  The stated policy of our government amounts to a program of extinction of a species.  Oh, the irony that the plant perfect for solving our energy, hunger, medical, and economic crises is the one our government deems so evil it must be wiped off the planet and its gardeners must be imprisoned.

The FBI has released its annual report on Crime in the United States 2007.  Once again, the number of people in the United States arrested for marijuana has gone up.  872,721 Americans were arrested for marijuana in 2007, and of those arrests, 89% or 775,138 were arrests for simple possession – not buying, selling, trafficking, or manufacture (growing).

This represents an increase in marijuana arrests of 5.2% from the previous year and the fifth straight year marijuana arrests have increased from the previous year.  Now a marijuana smoker is arrested at the rate of 1 every 37 seconds and almost 100 marijuana arrests per hour.

Marijuana possession is increasingly the bulk of the “War on Drugs”

More arrests for marijuana are for simple possession than for any other drug.  While only 11% of marijuana arrests involve buying, selling, trafficking, or manufacture, that rate for heroin and cocaine is 27% and that rate for synthetic drugs is 31%.  

While arrests for marijuana sales/manufacturing increased by 7.6% over 2006, heroin and cocaine sales/manufacturing arrests dropped by 3.8% and synthetic drugs sales/manufacturing arrests dropped 2.6%.

While arrests for marijuana possession rose by 4.9%, heroin and cocaine possession arrests fell by 8.1% and synthetic drugs possession arrests fell by 5.4%.

Overall, while arrests for marijuana increased by 5.2%, arrests for all other drugs combined dropped from 1,060,183 to 968,461, a decline of 8.7%.  Last year, marijuana arrests made up 43.9% of all drug arrests.  This year, marijuana accounts for 47.4% of all drug arrests.  Almost half of the war on drugs is waged on marijuana.

The West is the Best

The FBI breaks their data down into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, And West.  Arrests for marijuana make up more than half of all drug arrests in two out of four regions and almost half in a third. The Midwest leads the charge with 60.8% of its drug arrests for marijuana, followed by the South with 52.5% of its arrests and the Northeast with 49.9% of its arrests.  In the West, marijuana arrests only make up a little more than one-third of the drug arrest total at 34.3%.

This is the first time most of the country is dedicating most of its drug arrests toward marijuana.  In the previous year, only the Midwest, at 57%, surpassed 50%, with the South coming in at 49.8%, the Northeast at 47.9%, and the West at 30%.

Accounting for population of these regions, marijuana users in the South are most at risk, where there are 318 marijuana possession arrests for every 100,000 Southerners.  Midwesterners face a 292-to-100,000 ratio, in the Northeast it is 225-to-100,000, and only 201 per 100,000 Westerners are arrested for marijuana possession.

Over past five years, more arrests for marijuana than all violent crime combined

Perhaps most disturbing is comparing marijuana arrests to violent crime.  This year, while 775,138 Americans were arrested for mere marijuana possession, only 597,447 people were arrested for all violent crimes combined, which includes murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

While the percentage of marijuana possession arrests rose by 5.2%, arrests for violent crime dropped by 2.3% from the previous year.  Now, to be fair, the reported incidents of violent crime did show a slight decrease of 0.7%, from 1,417,745 in 2006 to 1,408,337 in 2007, but that’s only a decrease of 9,408 offenses, compared to a decrease of 14,076 arrests for those offenses.

Over the past five years, there have been more arrests every year for marijuana possession than for all violent crime combined.  Over those five years, murders have increased 2.3% and robberies have increased 7.5%. Overall, there were 24,661 more violent crimes in 2007 than in 2003, yet there were only 421 more arrests for violent crime in 2007 compared to 2003.  This year there were only 424 arrests for every 1000 violent crimes, which is 7-to-10 fewer arrests per 1000 than each of the previous four years.

Ten Year Trend

Over the past ten years, arrests for just about every crime have declined.  Arrests for all violent crimes have dropped by 8.9% and property crime arrests declined 12.5%.  Many other miscellaneous crime arrests have seen double-digit percentage declines, like fraud (-30.8%), prostitution (-22%), and offenses against family and children (-16.9%).  Meanwhile, in that ten years, the only crimes for which arrests have gone up are robbery (+5.9%), drug law violations (+17.6%), and embezzlement (+26.5%).