Washington – The focus of the drug war in the U.S. has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released Tuesday.
The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. Meanwhile, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.
The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons; just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions.
“The war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana,” said Ryan King, the study’s co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. The think tank is a left-leaning group that advocates alternatives to traditional imprisonment, but criminologists and government officials confirmed the trend.
