evidence: In 2020, there were 1,155,610 drug arrests in the U.S., the vast majority of which (86.7%) were for drug possession or use rather than for sale or manufacturing. See Crime in the United States Annual Reports, 2020, "Persons Arrested" Table 29 and the Arrests for Drug Abuse Violations table (available for download here). In 2021, the FBI (which aggregates these data from local law enforcement agencies) began requiring all agencies to report data using the NIBRS system, and no longer accepted reporting through the Unified Crime Reporting program. While this switch was planned years in advance, this resulted in "a massive gap in information," as almost 40% of agencies submitted no data in 2021, including those in large cities like New York and Los Angeles. Therefore, crime and arrest data from 2021 are less reliable than past years. For that reason, we caution against relying on the national arrest data from 2021. In 2022, the FBI accepted data through both the old and new systems, so 2022 data cover more jurisdictions than 2021; still, in 10 states (including large states like Florida, Illinois, and Georgia) less than 60% of law enforcement agencies submitted data. ↩