2006 Drug Arrests: Up, Up and Away

I'm late on this story, which has been amply covered by Talkleft, Drug WarRant and others, but at any rate I too want to note NORML's analysis of the latest federal stats on drug arrests: it shows that more than 800,000 people were arrested for marijuana offenses in 2006, with marijuana arrests making up 44% of all drug arrests. Those figures represent an increase over last year, continuing an overall 40 year trend of increasing arrests related to marijuana, as shown in the NORML graph below.

The 2006 statistics come from the new USDOJ 2006 Uniform Crime Report on crime in the United States. The 44% arrest number comes from the arrest table, which indicated that 39.1% of all drug arrests are for marijuana possession and 4.8% of all arrests are for marijuana sale/manufacturing. Put 'em together and you get 43.9%. Multiply 44% times the number of total drug abuse violations (1,889,810, according to Table 29 of the report), and you get a little over the 800,000 figure cited by NORML.

Also quite striking, on a broader level, is the USDOJ's report that fully 82.5% of all drug arrests are for possession. That's more than 1.5 million people who were arrested in 2006 simply for possession.