According to statistics released yesterday by the FBI, 2010 saw more people arrested in the United States for marijuana than any other year, with pot cases now accounting for more than half of all drug arrests in the country. Specifically 853,838 people were placed into custody for marijuana related crimes last year, a number that represents 52 percent of all drug arrests countrywide. More amazingly, a whopping 46 percent of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession.
Wow, that's a lot of stoners. Everyone feel safe now?
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The closer you look at the newly released statistics, which you can also peruse on the website for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, the more disturbing they are. For example, of the marijuana related arrests mentioned above, a whopping 750,591 people were only charged with possessing the drug, as opposed to the supposedly more serious crime of cultivating it or selling it. That's 88 percent of all pot cases.
Meanwhile, since 2000, roughly 7.9 million people have been arrested for marijuana.
It's unclear from the newly released stats how many of these unfortunate people were actually sent to jail or prison for smoking weed. But the numbers do reveal two facts that are now beyond dispute 1) Despite decades of prohibition,
Americans still love their weed and 2) whoever is running the so-called U.S. war on drugs is probably on crack.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).
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