Question by Ithilrien F: About how many people are arrested on marajuana charges each year?
I’ve done a lot of searching, but people in favor of legalisation don’t tend to cite their sources, and anti-drug people are oddly evasive about the numbers. I just need a straight answer, because it’s holding me up in a school project.

Best answer:

Answer by El Scott
Good luck finding anything official. I found a CBS article that claimed 734,000 Americans were “arrested” in 2001 for marijuana. You can find all kinds of numbers from other sources and the FBI doesn’t print totals in it UCR for drug arrests, just percentages by region.

I have arrested in parenthesis because many people just receive a citation for small amounts. Many of these cite and release encounters get reported as arrests because of the nature of the paperwork that is done by the charging agency.

According to the UCR there were 1,379,987 arrests for “drug abuse” in 2006 but that is not limited to marijuana.

Edit:
Actually if you do some math with the UCR you can get the number. The number of arrests for Sale/Manufacture of Marijuana were 4.8% which would be 68,999 (I rounded) and for Possession of Marijuana it would be 39.1% or 538,194. Those are the 2006 stats which are the most current.

FBI Uniform Crime Report:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/arrests/index.html

The UCR is the not the know all-end all but it should be a good ballpark figure.

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