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Marijuana plants from above
Police have a bone to pick with drug users, and only drug users, according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trust, which found that while arrests are down across the board and prosecution for drug use has plummeted, arrests for minor drug possession remained constant since 2009.
“Over the 10 years ending in 2019, the trends in drug arrests, prison admissions and prison population diverged,” the study found. “The U.S. continue[s] to rely heavily on the criminal legal system to address substance misuse,” while the police act as if the past decade of drug reforms and shifting mentalities did not happen.
Since the cannabis reform movement started in 2012 with the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington, 18 states and three U.S. territories legalized cannabis entirely, 31 states have decriminalized it and 36 legalized medical marijuana. Even in states that did not pass significant cannabis reform, progress has been happening at the local level, such as the cities of Milwaukee, Madison, Eau Claire and Green Bay choosing to decriminalize marijuana possession despite lack of state-level leadership on the matter in Wisconsin.
Drug Possession Arrests Run Counter to Other Metrics
Unfortunately, it seems the police did not get the memo. In 2009, the police arrested more than 1.3 million people for minor drug possession offenses. In 2019, they again arrested more than 1.3 million people for minor drug possession offenses. There are more places in the U.S. where possession of personal-use amounts of marijuana is tolerated than places where it is criminalized, today. Yet, arrests for petty drug possession offenses only decreased by 0.4% since 2009, and marijuana remains the top drug leading to arrests. This runs counter to all other policing metrics, as all arrests are down across the board, including arrests for drug trafficking, with the exception of arrests for drug possession.
Chart courtesy of the Pew Charitable Trusts
Drug arrests and state prisons chart
Unlike the police, the justice system in those states mirrored the changes in the law through a sharp decline in incarcerations for marijuana offenses. Prison admissions for drug offenses fell 34% between 2009 and 2019, Pew found. Researchers allege that a lot of this change is driven by a 32% drop in arrests for drug sales and manufacturing. Because while the police continue to crack down on minor, non-violent drug possession, they seem to have lightened suppression of drug trafficking.
Another large part of the decline can be attributed to the legalization of hemp through the 2018 Farm Bill. Spearheaded by Sen. Mitch McConnell, that bill made it legal to grow, sell and purchase cannabis with less than 0.3% THC (which stands for tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive component of cannabis). Industrial hemp is merely another nickname for the marijuana plant—once it became federally legal, even conservative states reevaluated how they approach legal punishment for simple possession of the now-legal cannabis plant. Before, merely owning a bit of green was evidence enough to obtain a conviction; now, even the most minor cases of petty possession of marijuana require extensive laboratory analysis to determine whether it might be a piece of perfectly legal industrial hemp.
Even Texas, with the nation’s toughest marijuana penalties, saw prosecutions for marijuana possession fall by more than half between 2018 and 2020. “Since the law change, prosecutors and state crime labs have dropped hundreds of pending marijuana charges and declined to pursue new ones because they don’t have the resources to detect a substance’s precise THC content, arguably keeping them from the evidence they need to prove in court if a cannabis substance is illegal,” The Texas Tribune reports.
Yet, the police continue to arrest people for offenses that will never be pursued further because they are just too small and inconsequential to be worth a prosecutor’s time and resources.
Meth and Racial Imbalances
Race is a central factor of the War on Drugs. Despite consuming marijuana at the same rate as white people, Black Americans are arrested almost four times as often for simple possession.
In fact, John Ehrlichman, one of the architects of the War on Drugs and domestic policy chief of the Nixon Administration, famously admitted that the purpose of policing drugs was racist at its very core: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The racist nature of policing drugs has not changed. “The percentage of 2019 drug-related prison admissions of Black folks (28%) was double their share of the general population,” says Tracy Velazquez, manager of criminal justice research for Pew and co-author of the study.
“Racial disparities in drug arrests dipped between 2009 and 2019. However, despite being only 13% of the U.S. population, Black people made up 37% of marijuana arrests in 2019. That's up from 32% in 2009,” the study reads. While there are fewer marijuana arrests in absolute numbers, white offenders benefited from this development more than their Black peers did, leading to Black marijuana users representing a relatively larger portion of marijuana arrests now than 10 years ago.
However, racial imbalances in all drug arrests, and not just marijuana, have been reduced. That is largely due to the rise in arrests for possession of methamphetamines, which rose by 260,000 in the time frame when arrests for possession of marijuana were reduced by 260,000. “Declines in marijuana arrests were backfilled with those for meth,” says Tracy Velazquez. Arrests for possession of meth doubled between 2009 and 2019.
Chart courtesy of the Pew Charitable Trusts
Drug arrests by race and substance
As it happens, white people use meth at a far higher rate than black people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that nearly 1.2 million white people and only 72,000 black people use meth per year on average. On average, there are 16 white meth users for every single black meth user. Yet, even as police arrest hundreds of thousands of mostly white additional meth users, there are only five white arrestees for each black person arrested by the police.
Does Arresting Drug Users Help Anyone?
In spite of the ultimate pointlessness of arrests made for an offense so minor that the justice system will dismiss it out of hand, police arrested more than 500,000 individuals for simple marijuana possession in 2019. For what purpose?
It started roughly 50 years ago, when then-President Richard Nixon declared war on the concept of drugs. Originally, the purpose was to end the illicit manufacture of drugs, repress trafficking and help the end users, whose quality of life suffered from drug abuse. The purpose of the War on Drugs was allegedly to help the victims of drugs: the addicts. Instead, addicts were targeted, harassed, arrested and imprisoned. Instead of receiving support, counsel and appropriate follow-up by medical professionals, millions of drug users were put behind bars and promptly forgotten.
“Richard Nixon declared drug abuse public enemy number one, and Congress passed legislation that sought to expand treatment and research. However, at the same time, intensified enforcement launched what became known as the ‘War on Drugs,’” the study reads. “The harsher penalties led to a 1,216% increase in the state prison population for drug offenses, from 19,000 to 250,000 between 1980 and 2008.”
Today, law enforcement agencies dedicate more than three times as many police hours and resources to minor drug offenses than to violent crimes. Nearly 90% of drug-related arrests for drugs are for simple possession, and a massive portion of all drug cases are for the most harmless substance of all, marijuana. Yet, in 2019, U.S. police made 1.56 million arrests for all drug offenses, more than 1.3 million of which were for simple possession; but they made only 500,000 arrests for all violent crimes combined. Arresting non-violent offenders for minor drug possession is by far the biggest piece of an average police department’s time and effort; more than policing traffic, assaults, property crimes and all violent crimes.
Why such intense focus on the most harmless category of offenses? Drug possession harms no one except the addicts themselves.
One could argue that an arrest and a prison sentence could turn someone’s life around by forcing them to be sober for the length of their prison stay. However, study after study proved that having been arrested, and to a greater degree having been incarcerated, drastically reduces employment opportunities for the rest of one’s life. Individuals who were imprisoned have an unemployment rate five times higher than average despite actively looking for work at a greater rate than the rest of the population. A blemish on one’s record, even for minor non-violent drug offenses, can sabotage a person’s ability to find employment, housing or any opportunities for the rest of their lives.
Pew found that addicts very rarely receive any help at all behind bars. “About 1.1 million people with past-year illicit drug dependence or misuse reported being arrested and booked in the past year, but of those, just 1 in 13 (85,199) reported receiving drug treatment while in jail or prison,” Pew reveals. “Drug-related mortality rates increased fivefold in prisons and threefold in jails despite the decreases in the number of people in prison for drug offenses.”
Most damning of all is the drug-related mortality rate in jails, which tripled between 2009 and 2019. Drug-related deaths while in law enforcement custody rose from 9 per 100,000 to 26 per 100,000 in just one decade. Even when arresting a drug user in need of immediate help, police tend to shove them into a cell and deny them access to medical care until death follows. Not only are those arrests pointless—as they are non-violent, non-harmful, minor offenses which will be dismissed by prosecutors—but the arrests themselves can prove deadly for the victims.
