State and local law enforcement made nearly 190,000 marijuana possession-related arrests in 2024 — comprising more than 22 percent of all drug arrests nationwide, according to data compiled by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and posted on its Crime Data Explorer website.
According to the database, police made at least 204,036 arrests for marijuana-related violations last year. (This total is likely an underestimate because some law enforcement agencies fail to report their arrest data to the FBI. The total also fails to calculate how many cannabis-related arrests are included in the tens of thousands of “unspecified drug abuse violations” reported by the FBI.)
Of those arrests, 92 percent (187,792 arrests) were for marijuana possession. The other 16,244 marijuana-related arrests were defined as “sales/manufacturing.”
Overall, the FBI reported 831,446 arrests nationwide for drug-related offenses in 2024.
2024’s marijuana arrest totals are lower than in prior years and they continue a trend that began nearly a decade ago when state governments initially began regulating adult-use marijuana markets — leading to a dramatic decline in cannabis-related arrests in those jurisdictions. Since 2012, 24 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana possession.
“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’s Deputy Director Paul Armentano said. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to be arrested annually for low-level cannabis-related violations even though a majority of voters no longer believe that the responsible use of marijuana by adults should be a crime.”
He added: “This 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 now legally regulated for adults in nearly half the states in this country.”
Marijuana arrests peaked in the United States in 2007, when police made over 870,000 marijuana-related arrests. At that time, just under half (48 percent) of all drug-related arrests in the United States were for marijuana-related violations. (The FBI changed the way they collected and reported crime data in 2021 making it difficult to compare more recent datasets with those of prior years.)
Since the year 2000, police have made over 16 million marijuana-related arrests in the United States.
Additional information on marijuana-related arrests is available from NORML.
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