Here's some sad news courtesy of the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report, released today:

• Even as the number of total arrests remained virtually unchanged, "drug abuse violations" accounted for nearly 1.7 million arrests, the most arrests for any offense type, an increase of more than 5% since 2002. (If you're arrested with a joint in your sock, you're counted as a "drug abuse violation".)
  
• Same holds true for kids. The report states that though the number of arrests of juveniles for violent crimes in 2003 remained virtually unchanged from the 2002 number, the number of arrests of juveniles for drug abuse violations rose 3.7 percent.
  
• The offense with the highest number of black arrestees was drug abuse violations. (That's about 1/8 of the population accounting for more than half of the drug arrests.)
  

As NORML points out in a release today, marijuana arrests rose by more than 55,000 last year to 755,187, which is double the number from just ten years ago.

Click here to read some of the relevant data from the report. (See, for example, page 269 for a regional breakdown of the data.)

If locking people up is success, then by golly we're winning that "war on drugs"!

What should be done? Those looking for answers might start in the pages of National Review, where the Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann took on the drug czar on these very issues some months ago.

Posted by Baylen Linnekin @ 4:52 PM