09/06/2026
More than half of U.S. cannabis arrests happened in just 10 states
Police in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana and Alabama made more than 131,000 ma*****na-related arrests in 2025, according to a NORML analysis of FBI data.
Nationwide, police reported at least 218,152 ma*****na arrests: 200,960 for possession and 17,192 for sales or manufacturing.
That means approximately 92% involved possession rather than selling or producing cannabis.
Texas led the country with more than 29,000 ma*****na arrests, accounting for roughly 14% of the national total. Approximately 98% of the state’s arrests involved possession alone.
North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin each reported more than 12,000 ma*****na arrests.
Louisiana had the highest proportion of drug arrests attributed to ma*****na possession, at 62%.
The numbers illustrate how dramatically ma*****na enforcement now varies by geography.
Recreational cannabis is legal in many states, where low-level possession arrests have fallen close to zero. Elsewhere, possessing the same substance can still result in fines, a criminal record or incarceration.
Ma*****na arrests also increased between 2024 and 2025, despite continuing a much longer downward trend associated with state legalization.
The reported figures probably understate the true total. Approximately 13% of state and local law-enforcement agencies did not submit 2025 data to the FBI, requiring the agency to estimate some national figures.
The FBI’s report also contains inconsistencies between tables that use apparently similar categories, making exact comparisons difficult.
Even with those limitations, one conclusion is clear: the likelihood of being arrested for ma*****na in America increasingly depends less on the substance itself than on the state in which someone possesses it.
