More than 200,000 people were arrested for possessing marijuana in the U.S. last year, according to the FBI’s latest annual crime report, and another 17,000 were booked for allegedly selling or growing cannabis.
Those figures likely understate the true number of people busted for marijuana, however, given inconsistencies in the federal data and questions about the agency’s changing methodology from recent years, as well as the fact that about 13 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies did not contribute data for 2025.
The full 2025 data set is based on more than 13 million criminal offenses reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, which is used to document and analyze national crime trends. The report covers 96,2 percent of the U.S. population, FBI said.
This latest data shows that cannabis-related offenses increased year over year, jumping to 200,960 marijuana possession busts in 2025 from 187,792 in the year prior, and to 17,192 sales or manufacturing arrests from 16,244 in 2024.
All told, marijuana busts accounted for a quarter of all drug arrests in 2025—more than for any other specifically listed substance—with 92 percent of cannabis incidents stemming from possession alone.
Despite the uptick in marijuana arrests from 2024
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