FBI Data: 1 in 4 Drug Arrests in 2025 Were for Marijuana

August 28, 2026

Nearly half the country has legalized marijuana in some form, yet police departments nationwide are still hauling people in for it at a rate that would surprise most casual observers of cannabis policy. A new NORML analysis of FBI Crime Data Explorer figures puts a hard number on it: marijuana possession accounted for roughly 23% of all drug arrests made in the United States in 2025. That's not a rounding error or a statistical quirk from a handful of outlier jurisdictions -- it's nearly one in four drug arrests in a year when overall drug arrests climbed 3% nationwide.

Put another way, state and local law enforcement made more than 218,000 marijuana-related arrests last year, in a country where 24 states have legalized adult-use cannabis and dozens more allow medical access. That figure isn't shrinking either -- it's higher than the year before. The persistence of these numbers raises an obvious question: if legalization is supposedly reshaping how the country treats cannabis, why does enforcement look so stubbornly unchanged in large parts of the map? The answer, as the state-by-state breakdown makes clear, has a lot to do with which states never got on board in the first place -- and how much daylight still exists between shifting public opinion and the statutes still on the books.

What the New FBI Numbers Show

The topline numbers come straight from FBI Crime Data Explorer figures, and NORML's analysis of them tells a fairly blunt story. State and local police made at least 218,152 marijuana-related arrests in 2025. Of those, 200,960 were for simple possession -- up from 187,792 in 2024, a jump of more than 13,000 arrests in a single year. Arrests tied to sales and manufacturing also rose, from 16,244 in 2024 to 17,192 in 2025. Neither category is trending downward.

Those marijuana arrests made up about 23% of the 858,852 total drug arrests recorded in 2025, itself a 3% increase over the prior year. So marijuana isn't just holding steady as a share of drug enforcement -- it's keeping pace with, and in some measures outpacing, the broader uptick in drug arrests overall. For a substance that's legal for adult use in nearly half the country, that's a striking share of law enforcement resources.

And there's good reason to think the real number is higher. Roughly 13% of law enforcement agencies didn't report data to the FBI at all in 2025, meaning entire jurisdictions are simply missing from this accounting. On top of that, some cannabis-related arrests get folded into broader unspecified drug violation categories that don't break out marijuana specifically, further obscuring the true scope. The 218,152 figure should be read as a floor, not a ceiling -- the actual number of people arrested over marijuana last year was almost certainly higher.

Which States Are Still Arresting the Most People

Texas reported by far the highest number of marijuana arrests in 2025 at 29,000, more than double any other state shown, while Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee each had roughly 11,000–12,000 arrests.

National averages flatten out what's actually a wildly uneven picture. Texas alone accounted for over 29,000 marijuana arrests in 2025 -- about 14% of the entire national total from a single state. Ninety-eight percent of those arrests were for simple possession, not distribution or manufacturing. That's consistent with Texas law, which still treats low-level possession as a misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine, even as neighboring states have moved toward decriminalization or full legalization.

Texas isn't alone at the top. Georgia logged 11,238 marijuana arrests, North Carolina reported 11,830, Tennessee recorded 11,194, and Wisconsin came in at 11,470. Each of those states cleared the 11,000 mark on its own, meaning five states combined accounted for a disproportionate slice of arrests nationwide -- all of them located in the South or Midwest, all of them holdouts on adult-use legalization.

Contrast that with five states where marijuana arrests barely registered: Alaska (92), Maine (96), Montana (35), Rhode Island (99), and Vermont (16). Some of these states logged fewer arrests in an entire year than Texas made in a single week. That gap isn't explained by population differences alone -- it comes down to state law and local enforcement priorities. Federal cannabis policy, whatever direction it eventually takes, has essentially no bearing on whether a police officer in Dallas or Nashville decides to arrest someone for a joint. That decision still lives almost entirely at the state and county level, and the data shows it.

How This Compares to the Peak Arrest Years

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Zoom out further and the current numbers look almost restrained compared to the mid-2000s. Marijuana arrests peaked in 2007, when police made more than 870,000 marijuana-related arrests in a single year -- accounting for a staggering 48% of all drug arrests nationwide at the time. Since 2000, cumulative marijuana-related arrests have topped 16 million, a figure that captures just how central cannabis enforcement has been to the broader drug war for a quarter century.

Comparing today's numbers to that era gets complicated by a methodology overhaul the FBI implemented in 2021, when it shifted agencies toward a new incident-based reporting system. That transition makes clean year-to-year comparisons harder than they used to be, and it shows up in the FBI's own data in ways that undercut confidence in any single figure. Depending on which table you pull, the FBI reports wildly different totals for drug and narcotic offenses in 2025 -- one table lists 1,492,005, another 1,656,774, and a third 1,958,377. That's not a small discrepancy; it's a difference of nearly half a million offenses depending on which internal FBI dataset you trust.

Even accounting for that inconsistency, the broader trend is real: marijuana arrests have declined substantially from their 2007 peak, tracking the spread of legalization and decriminalization across much of the country. But the raw numbers still put marijuana among the most heavily enforced drug categories in America, a fact that gets lost in conversations that treat legalization as a settled, nationwide reality rather than a patchwork still very much in progress.

Why Advocates Say the Numbers Don't Add Up

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NORML deputy director Paul Armentano has been direct about what these numbers mean: continued arrest totals in the low six figures are hard to justify at a moment when legalization covers roughly half the states and public support for it sits well above majority levels in national polling. The argument isn't that marijuana enforcement has stayed flat everywhere -- it's that a shrinking number of holdout states are still generating enough arrests to keep the national total stubbornly high.

Those arrests carry consequences that don't disappear just because a charge is classified as a misdemeanor. A criminal record, court fines, potential jail time, lost job opportunities, immigration complications -- these follow people well after any sentence is served, even in states where marijuana possession is treated as a low-level offense rather than a felony. For the person getting arrested, the legal and financial fallout is real regardless of what neighboring states have decided to do.

That unevenness is really the core of the problem advocates point to: someone's actual legal risk for identical behavior -- carrying a small amount of marijuana -- depends almost entirely on which state, and sometimes which county, they happen to be standing in. A person in Burlington faces essentially no enforcement risk; a person in Dallas faces a jail sentence. Advocates also read this data as evidence that ongoing federal debates over rescheduling or descheduling marijuana haven't yet translated into fewer arrests on the ground, since most of this enforcement never touched federal law to begin with. Given how much enforcement still varies by jurisdiction, readers should check current state and local cannabis laws before assuming possession carries little risk -- this reporting isn't legal advice, and local ordinances change independently of state or federal action.

Step back from the year-over-year percentages and the picture is fairly straightforward: legalization momentum at the state level hasn't made marijuana arrests a relic of the past, because enforcement is concentrated in a specific, identifiable set of states that never changed their possession laws. Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin aren't outliers reacting to some new enforcement trend -- they're simply operating under statutes that criminalize behavior that's legal a few states over.

That's the part worth sitting with. Arrest totals in those states aren't going to drop because California legalized cannabis a decade ago, or because federal rescheduling discussions move forward in Washington. They'll drop only when those specific state legislatures change their own possession statutes, and there's no indication that's imminent in most of the states driving the national total. Until then, someone arrested for a joint in Nashville or Milwaukee will keep facing consequences that someone doing the identical thing in Portland or Providence simply won't.

That disconnect -- between national polling that consistently shows majority support for legalization and arrest data that shows enforcement barely budging in large swaths of the country -- isn't likely to resolve itself quietly. If anything, it's the kind of gap that tends to fuel state-level reform campaigns, ballot initiatives, and legislative pushes in exactly the states where the numbers are worst. The federal picture may shift eventually, but for now, the arrest data makes clear that the real fight over marijuana enforcement is still being fought statehouse by statehouse.