State and local police made at least 218,152 marijuana-related arrests in 2025, including 200,960 for possession, which accounted for about 23% of all drug arrests nationwide. The true total may be higher because roughly 13% of law-enforcement agencies did not report arrest data to the FBI and some cannabis cases may be included among unspecified drug violations.
The FBI has published new data on arrests by state and local law enforcement across the US. The numbers are in: 218,152 people were arrested for marijuana-related offenses in 2025 alone. You read that right: in a country where medical cannabis is legal in most states, where a multibillion-dollar industry has grown around the plant, where industry executives are helping shape presidential cannabis policy, and where most Americans believe it should already be legal, hundreds of thousands of people are losing their freedom for simply having weed on them. Not for selling it, not for manufacturing it, not for violence: for possession.
If one were feeling generous, one might think that perhaps most of those arrests involved violence or evidence of intent to sell. But that’s not the case: only 17,192 of the arrests were categorized as “sales/manufacturing.” The other 200,960—that is, 92%—were for “low-level marijuana possession,” which typically involves small amounts for personal use. Possession arrests alone represent about 23% of all drug-related arrests nationwide, which totaled 858,852 in 2025. To put that figure in perspective, 200,960 arrests amount to roughly one every three minutes in the Land of the Free.
In fact, the actual number might be much higher: as NORML points out, about 13% of law enforcement agencies failed to report their data to the Bureau. In addition, there are tens of thousands of “unspecified drug abuse violations” in the report, which might include weed possession among them. All this without taking into account that the FBI has repeatedly changed its …
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Author: Marian Venini / High Times
