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Pot Arrests Rise as Arrests for Heroin, Cocaine Decline
May 4, 2005

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Research Summary

About half of all drug arrests in the U.S. are for offenses related to marijuana, while arrests for heroin and cocaine have fallen off sharply, the Washington Post reported May 4.

The nonprofit Sentencing Project issued a report on FBI crime data that showed that 45 percent of drug arrests in 2002 were for marijuana offenses, up from 28 percent in 1992. Meanwhile, heroin and cocaine arrests declined from 55 percent of the total in 1992 to less than 30 percent in 2002.

From 1990 to 2000, total drug arrests rose from 1.1 million annually to 1.5 million per year, with marijuana arrests accounting for 80 percent of the increase, the report said. About one in four arrestees are considered low-level offenders.

"In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana," said the Sentencing Project's Ryan S. King, co-author of the report. "Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn't explain this level of growth over time ... The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?"

Federal drug officials say the increase in marijuana arrests is due to increased use by teens, more police focus on street-level dealing, and heightened concern about the drug.

"There's been a major change in what's going on in drug enforcement, but it clearly isn't something that someone set out to do," said criminology professor Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "It's not like anyone said, 'We don't care about cocaine and heroin anymore.' ... The simple answer may be that police are now taking opportunities to make more marijuana arrests than they were when they were focused on crack cocaine in the 1980s."

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