marijuana arrests – Memphis Flyer

Tennessee is near the top for arresting people for cannabis and near the bottom for cannabis justice.

Those are the conclusions from Denver-based The Last Prisoner Project (LPP). The group is “dedicated to releasing every last cannabis prisoner and helping them rebuild their lives.” It works on drug policy and criminal justice reform to “redress the harms of the federal government’s so-called ‘War on Drugs.’”

The group said 14,426 people were arrested for cannabis in Tennessee in 2022, using the latest available data. The figure gives the state an arrest rate of .2 percent per the population. Cannabis arrests comprised 39 percent of all drug arrests in the state that year.

This puts Tennessee near the top in two of these rankings. Only Texas arrested more people for cannabis that year (24,941). (But given that state’s huge population, the arrests rate was only .08 percent of its population.) Only Wisconsin had a higher arrest rate for cannabis (.22 percent). In Louisiana, 60 percent — more than half — of all drug arrests were for cannabis.

But LPP admits that any real figure to determine exactly how many people are locked up on cannabis charges will be “an educated guess” at best.

“Unfortunately, thanks to our complex and oftentimes impenetrable hodgepodge of local, state, and federal criminal justice databases nobody — not even the federal government — is privy to that exact number,” reads a blog post from the group.

However, the group’s figures (and Tennessee’s cannabis arrest rates) aren’t plucked form the air. LPP relied on two separate Bureau of Justice Statistics reports reviewing incarcerated populations by drug-specific offenses. That is, the report counted all those behind bars for drugs and what drugs brought them there.

But the figure has to be low. Those reports don’t count those in local and county jails, juvenile detention facilities, and those held for pre-trial and pre-sentencing. Also, some facilities just don’t report to the feds like they should.

“Nearly 40 percent of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program,” according to a study from The Marshall Project. Neither New York City nor Los Angeles reported to the FBI that year, for example.

But the LPP can measure how well states help those previously incarcerated to find justice in the wake of either cannabis legalization or service of their time.

Don’t worry. Tennessee does terrible there, too. Its June report gave Tennessee a D- after earning 3 points. (California earned 25 points for scale.)

“With no full legalization, no pardon policy, no avenues for resentencing, and extremely limited avenues for record clearance, Tennessee falls behind and offers virtually no relief for individuals impacted by past cannabis prohibition,” reads the report.

The LPP gave Tennessee two points for a law passed in 2022 that allowed for some criminal records to be expunged. However, it wasn’t written specifically for cannabis and the LPP said, “this unfortunately means that cannabis offense are not expedited nor guaranteed.”

The state’s other point in the report came as the law does include broad eligibility for different levels of offenses. Tennessee scored points only in two of the report’s 16 categories.

Don’t worry. Mississippi and Arkansas scored a D-, too. However, both states got an extra point over Tennessee for having some sort of legalization and/or decriminalization process. Tennessee has neither.

Marijuana arrests rose for the third consecutive year in 2018, according to new data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Police made 663,367 arrests for marijuana-related violations last year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. The National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML) said that number is 21 percent higher than the total number of people arrested for violent crimes (521,103). The organization noted that 90 percent of those arrested on marijuana charges were arrested for possession charges only.

“Police across America make a marijuana-related arrest every 48 seconds,” NORML executive director Erik Altieri said in a statement. “At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans want cannabis to be legal and regulated, it is an outrage that many police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession.”

The climbing number of marijuana arrests reverses a trend of falling arrests that began in 2007, when police made a record 872,721 arrests on marijuana-related charges in the U.S. The increase also comes as more states have legalized the recreational use of cannabis for adults.

Meanwhile, a new report published in the journal Justice Quarterly said crime does not increase in states with legalized cannabis.

Researchers with the Department of Justice and Criminology at Washington State University reviewed crime rates in Colorado and Washington after cannabis legalization.

“Marijuana legalization and sales have had minimal to no effect on major crimes in Colorado or Washington,” reads the report. “We observed no statistically significant long-term effects of recreational cannabis laws or the initiation of retail sales on violent or property crime rates in these states.”

Tennessee Petition

Memphis NORML launched a petition recently on change.org that the group hopes it can share with state lawmakers to show people “want and really need medical cannabis in Tennessee.”

“Tennessee lawmakers say they don’t believe there is enough support to even vote on the medical cannabis bills that keep getting presented,” reads the petition. “We need to show them how many people, the people they are supposed to represent, really want and need medical cannabis in Tennessee.”

David Youngman signed the petition because he said cannabis can complement cancer treatment, noting that two of his aunts died from cancer.

“If pot can help even just a tiny little bit, then anyone keeping it from them is the true criminal,” Youngman wrote.

Marijuana is Midtown

While marijuana may not yet be relaxed in the law books, maybe it already is in the streets. A Nextdoor user said “the strong odor of marijuana is now ubiquitous in Midtown” in a post on the social networking service last week.

“Some people are apparently oblivious to how much they reek,” he wrote. “It’s in stores, on sidewalks, at traffic intersections. It rolls out of car windows of parents waiting to pick their kids up at the elementary school in front of my house. I wonder how many kids go to school with a contact high.”