NORMLIZER

Since 1990, more than 10.4 million Americans have been busted for pot. That’s according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which revealed in September that a record 829,625 Americans were arrested for violating marijuana laws last year. Of those arrested, 89 percent were charged with simple pot possession, the highest annual total ever recorded and nearly three times the number of citizens busted 15 years ago. Yet to hear law enforcement spin it, busting small-time potheads isn’t their priority. The record number of busts, they claim, is simply a reflection of the record number of Americans that are now smoking pot.

But don’t tell Drug Czar John Walters that. In early October, at a press conference announcing the release of the federal Office of Applied Studies 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the czar claimed that pot use has been declining for the better part of the past five years. But both the cops and the drug czar are playing fast and loose with the facts. Yes, it’s true that more Americans are now admittedly consuming pot today than in 1991—a clear demonstration of the War on Drugs’ failure—but this increase is hardly proportional to the dramatic spike in overall pot arrests.

As for Walters’ comments, while the survey did indeed report a minor decline in adolescents’ self-reported use of pot, it further reported a minor uptick in the total number of Americans who report using marijuana regularly, from 14.6 million in 2005 to 14.8 million in 2006. A less than 2 percent increase in pot users from ’05 to ’06 doesn’t explain why pot arrests jumped more than 5 percent from a then-record 786,545 to today’s total, or why the overall number of annual pot arrests has gone up every consecutive year but two of the past 16 years.

Perhaps the explanation is twofold. It’s plausible that the federal government is greatly underestimating the number of Americans who use pot (and that it has always done so—does anyone really believe that cops are busting on average 5 percent of all pot smokers each year?). It’s also possible that one consequence of the ever-growing number of cops on the street (and citizens’ increasing number of interactions with them) is, inevitably, more pot arrests.

Regardless of the explanation, it seems remiss for police and politicians not to acknowledge this growing trend and its burdensome fiscal and cultural implications. The bottom line: Since 1990, more than 10.4 million Americans—predominantly young people under age 30—have been busted for pot. Thousands have been disenfranchised; tens of thousands have been unnecessarily sent to “drug treatment”; hundreds of thousands have lost their eligibility for student aid; and an entire generation has been alienated, taught to believe that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection. These are the tangible results of the government’s intensified war on pot. It’s high time that politicians and the general public began taking notice.

Paul Armentano, senior policy analyst for NORML
Visit norml.org, or call (888) 67-NORML.