More Americans were arrested for pot in 2016 than for all violent crimes combined

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published 26 September 2017

By the time you read to the end of this post, another person in America will have been arrested on charges of marijuana possession. In fact, on average, U.S. law enforcement arrest one person for pot possession every single minute of every single day.

In 2016, that pace amounted to about 587,700 arrests for marijuana possession nationwide, The Washington Post reported Tuesday based on aggregate crime data released by the FBI Monday. That figure is larger than the combined total of arrests for all crimes the FBI places in the violent crimes category, including murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, some cases of arson, and aggravated assault.

That comparison becomes all the more remarkable in light of the fact that polling shows about six in 10 Americans support legalizing recreational pot use, and public opinion has been steadily trending toward legalization for years. That support rate is 71 percent among millennials, now the largest generation in the United States, and even a majority of Republican millennials (63 percent) support legalization.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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