The success of marijuana legalization throughout the United States over the last few years has somewhat persuaded the American public that the War on Weed is coming to an end.
The latest national crimes statistics published earlier this week by the FBI show that police officers are continuing to apprehend people for minor marijuana crimes at a rate significantly higher than arrests for other”Epidemic” drugs.
In reference to the report, law officials made over 700,000 cannabis-related arrests in 2014, which represents an increase for the first time since 2009.
However this inflation of handcuffs does not display a crucial uprising in the way law enforcement in prohibition districts are still handling marijuana, it does suggest that these forces have at least ramped up their marijuana enforcement to a degree-despite public opinion showing nationwide support for marijuana legalization.
What is triggering more alarms is that the majority of these minor marijuana arrests were not attributed to hardcore drug trafficking operations, but for simple possession.
The data shows that 88 percent of all the arrests that happened in 2014 were for people who were apprehended for cannabis possession alone.
Just over 5 percent of the arrests were for bigger offenses involving the illegal cultivation and distribution of cannabis.
This means that over 600,000 people went to jail this past year for using a substance that is now legal for recreational and medicinal purposes or decriminalized in more than half the United States.
“These numbers refute the myth that nobody actually gets arrested for using marijuana,” Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project said in a statement.
“It’s hard to imagine why more people were arrested for marijuana possession when fewer people than ever believe it should be a crime.”
There is speculation that while the nation continues to push towards legalization, police working in prohibition states are putting forth more effort than ever to show they don’t support the issue.
Arrests for pot possession had been on a steadily decreasing since around 2007; that is until Colorado and Washington initiated full-scale cannabis markets and the majority of the nation seemed in favor of doing the same.
Surprisingly, nearly 40 percent of all the drug-related arrests this past year were for cannabis-related crimes, while arrests for the combination of cocaine, heroin, and similar substances ranked only 17 percent.
Some might argue that arrests for marijuana were more prevalent than harder drugs because it is still one of the most popular illicit substances in the country.
With heroin and prescription painkiller abuse reportedly becoming a nationwide epidemic, it seems a bit odd that police are still focused on eliminating stoners in their grand scheme of the domestic drug war.
While it is true that most of these pot arrests likely did not end in prison terms, they undoubtedly came with brutal consequences.
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