Marijuana-related arrests in Wisconsin hit a record low in 2019, the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DoJ) revealed. The recently released data shows that 16,044 arrests were carried out for marijuana offenses last year, significantly less than the year prior. The number of arrests for selling marijuana took a dive from 1,828 to 1,352, while the arrests for simple possession went from 17,433 in 2018 to 14,692.
The repression of cannabis by law enforcement led to an ever-increasing number of arrests in past decades. In 1986, only 5,847 people were arrested for marijuana offenses, and that number surged to 19,261 in 2018, an increase of 329%. There were 18,905 arrests in 2017, 18,050 in 2016, and so on, each year seeing more arrests than the one before. The worst year on record was 2018. The year 2019 breaks the trend, bringing the numbers down to their lowest point since 1997.
Roughly half-a-million arrests for marijuana offenses were carried out in Wisconsin since the 1980s. Marijuana arrests peaked under former governor Scott Walker, who oversaw nearly 150,000 of them. It is a fact that local activist Gary Storck highlights in his book, The Rise and Fall of Cannabis Prohibition in Wisconsin, noting that Walker arrested in eight years “just 5,000 less than Thompson’s entire 14 years in office.”
“In 2019, the steep decreases in arrests for both possession and sales really stand out,” Storck explained. “Before 2019, possession arrests trended upward for a long time. Sales numbers stayed pretty stable, though they steadily declined as a percentage of total arrests. I would say that repressing drug use was the priority.”
In 1986, nearly one out of every five marijuana-related arrest was for trafficking, but arrests for selling marijuana stagnated—from 1,090 in 1986 to 1,828 in 2018—while arrests for simple possession skyrocketed, from less than 5,000 to 17,433 in 2018. It is interesting to note that arrest for possessing drugs other than pot, combined, barely total 9,000 in 2018, meaning that two-thirds of all drug users arrested that year used marijuana rather than opioids, cocaine or synthetic drugs. On the other hand, there are roughly as many people arrested for selling marijuana as people arrested for selling other drugs, denoting an attempt to criminalize the consumption of marijuana far more than trafficking.
What Inverted the Trend
The most obvious change between 2018 and 2019 is the election of Democratic governor Tony Evers. With the exception of Jim Doyle—who didn’t do anything for marijuana reform—in the 2000s, Evers is the state’s first Democratic governor since 1986, and he is the first to be outspoken in favor of weed: He ran on a promise to legalize medical marijuana and to put full legalization on the ballot, and he attempted to include it in the state budget despite blowback from the Republican Legislature.
“When more than 80% of our state supports medical marijuana... and elected officials can ignore those numbers without consequence, folks, something’s wrong,” Evers said in his 2020 state of the state address. “The will of the people is the law of the land, and by golly, the people should not take no for an answer.” By his side, Evers also has Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is a self-professed advocate for the legalization of medical marijuana.
Starting in the 1980s, “then-Gov. Tommy Thompson and other state Republicans tagged Democrats as ‘soft on drugs’ as a political tactic, and this attitude has persisted” explains Storck, who sees the dip in arrests as a sign of changing times rather than resulting from the actions of one leader. “I really have to link these decreases to the advocacy around and passage of the advisory referendums in November 2018 and early 2019. It is really only in the last several years—as other states have legalized and state and local elected officials have warmed to the issue—that enforcement has declined outside of Milwaukee County and other larger urban areas.”
Racial Breakdown
According to the 2019 census, 87.1% of Wisconsin inhabitants are white and 6.7% are black. As studies have consistently found that drug use is the same regardless of race, it would stand to reason to expect roughly 7% of people arrested for marijuana offenses in Wisconsin to be black. This is not the case. In 2019, 23% of people arrested for simple possession of marijuana in the state were black, while only 63% were white.
While there were much fewer marijuana-related arrests in 2019, not all races benefited equally from the reprieve. Total arrests decreased almost 17%, arrests of white pot users decreased 18%, but arrests of black ones decreased only 9%. In 2018, black people arrested for simple possession totaled only 21% of all arrests.
Milwaukee has always been a hotspot of racial inequalities, as one of the nation’s most segregated cities to this day, and cannabis repression is a key sign of this systemic imbalance. Between 2012 and 2015, in the City of Milwaukee, 72% of people arrested for small-scale marijuana possession were black, and only 12% were white.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice provided a racial breakdown of marijuana-related arrests in Milwaukee County on the Shepherd Express’ request. There were 2,152 such arrests in 2019, down from 2,652 the year before, and nearly 55% were black. In 2019, 638 people were arrested by the Milwaukee Police Department—down from 1,700 in 2015—of which 529 were black and 82 were white. That means that 83% of people arrested on pot charges in 2019 in the City of Milwaukee were black.
While there were fewer arrests, in absolute numbers, the proportion of black people among the remaining arrests sharply increased. While we are seeing a significant improvement in the overall repression of cannabis, it seems obvious that white Wisconsinites benefit from it disproportionately compared to their non-white neighbors.
