Philadelphia Arrests 6,572 Citizens (78% African American) for Marijuana in 2006

[Derek Rosenzweig]

Philadelphia Arrests 6,572 Citizens (78% African American) for Marijuana in 2006
By Derek Rosenzweig

Since 1990, 10,448,499 Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses. A couple of years ago, I was one of them, although I don’t know which number. These days someone’s arrested for a marijuana offense every 38 seconds. In 2006, that amounted to a record 829,625 people, nearly a six percent increase over 2005. In Pennsylvania alone, approximately 29,144 people were arrested.

As usual, the vast majority of nationwide arrests - 89% - were for possession only. The remaining 11% were for sales and/or manufacturing. So, with these ever increasing, record arrests ever year, you'd expect this 'War on Marijuana™' to be won by now, right? Unsurprisingly, this is not the case. By our government’s own estimates, about 94 million Americans over the age of 12 have tried marijuana at least once in their lifetimes, and about 14.6 million Americans smoke, eat, or vaporize the plant regularly. Guess how much money we as taxpayers pay every year to lock up these people. Guess how much money the prison and drug testing industries make off of the suffering of people who hurt nobody. How much more are you willing to spend to put the remaining 93.2 million Americans who have tried it in jail? We already jail more people for drug offenses than the entirety of Europe does for all offenses combined.

Even worse is the increasing discrepancy along racial lines of who is arrested. In 2006 in Philadelphia county, according to the Pennsylvania Unified Crime Report, 6,572 people were arrested. Of those, 5,137, or 78.2% were black, whereas only 1,405, or 21.8% are white. According to the 2000 census, 43.2 percent of the city's population is black and 45 percent is white It's pretty hard to see these numbers and not come to the conclusion that there is something inherently racist about the war on marijuana users. Of course, Harry Anslinger used racism - often blatant racism - in his testimony to Congress in 1937 when he effectively made marijuana illegal. These blights on our country are kept in the archives for anybody to see. In this day and age, I would hope that racism would have been diminished, but these numbers clearly show that America has far to go.

Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save US taxpayers approximately nearly $42 billion dollars per year. That's a lot of money that we can put towards education, energy reform, or tax refunds to every American. Those are also fairly conservative numbers. More importantly, it will solve, or at least alleviate, more pressing matters. We all want our children to be safe, and people don't want their kids smoking pot. So why are we handing them easy access by allowing criminals to control the market? That’s just dumb. They won’t card your son or daughter, but the local 7-11 will. A legal, regulated market will eliminate the black market by virtue of its nature. Realistically, it’s impossible to completely stop children from trying pot, but a regulated market makes it much harder for them to get it.

We all want to be safe, but while pot is illegal, people and gangs will fight over it. The reason is simple: it’s worth a lot of money. Its own weight in gold actually. The reason it’s worth so much should be obvious: everyone loves the stuff. Legal and regulated, it wouldn’t be quite the gold mine that it is now, but people wouldn’t get shot over it anymore, especially 92 year old women in Georgia who have done literally nothing wrong.

Some people say that marijuana will never be legalized, but I disagree. Our country wants to move on; the drug war has failed miserably, and everybody knows it. It’s an abyss down into which our money goes, along with the dignity of a once proud nation. More and more, politicians are coming around because they see the train-wreck of prohibition for what it really is. Already, all of the Democratic candidates for President have pledged to stop the raids on patients and dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws. What remains to be seen is when those with the loudest voices will stand up and proudly support ending this sadistic war on marijuana users, and support implementing a regulated market. The people are waiting.

[1puffer]

Derek,  can you tell us, where do you get these numbers from. 

According to this table in the 2006 Uniform Crime Report http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_30.html  1.4M people were arrested for "Drug Abuse Violations" in the United States.    If in fact 829,625  people were arrested for MJ in 2006 then simple math tells us over half of all drug arrests are for Marijuana.       The Demon Weed     This smiliey is funny because it is appropriate but this situation is not funny at all.   

1puff

[Derek Rosenzweig]

Numbers for national arrests came from the FBI unified crime report (taken from NORML National's website). Numbers for Philly came from the PA unified crime report.

[1puffer]

thx Oz,

 This table http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_29.html  better reflects how the "War on Drugs" arrests seems to take a priority over "violent crime" arrests and every other category too.   

Heres the table.

Estimated Number of Arrests
United States, 2006

The FBI collects these data through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.
General comments

This table provides the estimated number of arrests for 29 separate UCR offenses for the United States. This is the only table in this publication which supplies estimated data for arrests.
Methodology

The data used in creating the estimates for this table were from all law enforcement agencies that provided data to the UCR Program (including those submitting less than 12 months of complete arrest data for 2006).
Arrest Estimation

* The arrest totals presented are national estimates based on the arrest statistics of all law enforcement agencies that provided data to the UCR Program (including those submitting less than 12 months of data).
* The estimated total number of arrests in this table is the sum of estimated arrest volumes for 28 offenses, not including suspicion.
* The arrest data for each of the individual offenses in this table is the sum of the estimated volumes within each of the eight population groups. (See the Area Definitions.)
* The FBI calculated each of the eight population group’s arrest estimates by dividing the reported volume figures (as shown in Table 31) by the contributing agencies’ jurisdictional populations. The resulting figure was then multiplied by the total population for each population group as estimated by the Program.

Population estimation

The FBI calculated 2006 state growth rates using revised 2005 state/national population estimates and 2006 provisional state/national population estimates provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. The FBI then estimated population figures for the Nation by applying the 2006 state growth rate to the updated 2005 U.S. Census Bureau data.
If you have questions about this table

Contact the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division via e-mail at cjis_comm@leo.gov or by telephone at (304) 625‑4995.

Total1	14,380,370
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter	13,435
Forcible rape	24,535
Robbery	125,605
Aggravated assault	447,948
Burglary	304,801
Larceny-theft	1,081,157
Motor vehicle theft	137,757
Arson	16,582
Violent crime2	611,523
Property crime2	1,540,297
Other assaults	1,305,757
Forgery and counterfeiting	108,823
Fraud	280,693
Embezzlement	20,012
Stolen property; buying, receiving, possessing	122,722
Vandalism	300,679
Weapons; carrying, possessing, etc.	200,782
Prostitution and commercialized vice	79,673
Sex offenses (except forcible rape and prostitution)	87,252
Drug abuse violations	1,889,810
Gambling	12,307
Offenses against the family and children	131,491
Driving under the influence	1,460,498
Liquor laws	645,734
Drunkenness	553,188
Disorderly conduct	703,504
Vagrancy	36,471
All other offenses	4,022,068
Suspicion	2,482
Curfew and loitering law violations	152,907
Runaways	114,179

* 1 Does not include suspicion.
* 2 Violent crimes are offenses of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crimes are offenses of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

[dOc]

Unfortunately in the yearly reports Pennsylvania and the FBI both lump ALL drug violations into one category called "Drug Abuse". This is a problem but fortunately for us there is a workaround. We can still get individualized numbers on the specific crimes from doing a query in the UCR system. It is jsut unfortunate that they lump them together for no reason. Maybe they do it because that is the only "official" release that can be used for numbers and that the individual search queries have a warning at the bottom that only the yearly reports are valid.