U.S. Drug Arrests by State (2025)

America reported 856,972 drug and narcotic arrests in 2025. Ten states drove more than half of them.

By raw count, no state came close to Texas. Its 96,313 reported drug arrests made up 11.2% of the U.S. total. California remained #2 with 83,106.

Drug arrests ticked back up in 2025 after years of decline. Nationally, reported drug arrests rose 2.1% from 2024 to 2025. From a revised 839,324 in 2024 to 856,972 in 2025. Totals remain far below 2019 levels, but 2025 did not continue the multi-year decline.

These findings come from our analysis of reported FBI drug/narcotic arrest data for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., with a focus on 2025 data and a look back at 2024.  We looked at the numbers three ways: raw totals, per-capita rates and drug arrests as a share of all reported arrests.

• Drug offenses represented about 1 in every 8 reported arrests nationwide in 2025. Reported drug arrests rose 2.1% from 2024
• Ten states accounted for 54.4% of all U.S. drug arrests in 2025. Texas alone made up 11.2%, followed by California at 9.7%. 
• Per capita, Arizona’s drug-arrest rate plunged 28.8%, dropping the state from #3 to #14. South Dakota and Wyoming remained #1 and #2, with the highest drug-arrest rates per 100,000 residents.
• Pennsylvania had the largest drug-arrest share of policing. Drug offenses made up 20.2% of all reported arrests in Pennsylvania in 2025, even as the state’s own arrest count fell 11.6% year over year. It still reported the 3rd-highest number of arrests nationally.

Reported drug arrests were not spread evenly across the country in 2025. The top 10 states accounted for 54.4% of all reported drug/narcotic arrests nationwide.

Texas led by a wide margin, with 96,313 reported drug arrests. California ranked second at 83,106, followed by Pennsylvania at 55,424.

Texas stayed on top of the raw count and reported 3,966 more drug arrests than in 2024, a 4.3% increase.

California had the second-most drug arrests in the country in 2025, with 83,106 reported arrests, up 24.3% from 66,833 in 2024.

California’s drug-enforcement environment changed substantially over the past decade, including Proposition 47’s reclassification of some drug-possession offenses. At the same time, the state’s transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) disrupted its FBI reporting, including a year in which California could not submit crime data to the FBI at all. So while California clearly reports far fewer drug arrests than it did before the pandemic, the massive decline should not be read as a clean measure of changing enforcement alone. With 83,106 reported arrests in 2025, California still ranked #2 nationally for most arrests.

Pennsylvania ranked #3 nationally for total drug arrests in 2025. It reported 55,424 drug arrests. Despite California having roughly three times as many residents, Pennsylvania recorded 424.4 drug arrests per 100,000 residents, about twice California’s rate of 211.2.

Pennsylvania’s high rate also comes amid continued targeted drug enforcement. The state’s Attorney General launched the Kensington Initiative, for example, which has focused on disrupting supply chains in Philadelphia’s open-air drug markets rather than mass arrests.

While some of the most populated states are at the top of the list, it’s not just a population ranking. Arizona, Tennessee and South Carolina all appear in the top 10 for drug arrests.

A raw arrest count shows where the largest number of arrests happened. A per-capita rate shows where reported arrests were most concentrated relative to population. 

South Dakota and Wyoming ranked first and second by rate. Washington, D.C., ranked third.

A large state can carry a large share of the national count even if drug arrests are less concentrated relative to its population. A smaller state can have fewer arrests overall, but a much heavier per-capita footprint.

South Dakota and Wyoming again recorded the country’s highest reported drug-arrest rates, at 642.9 and 562.2 arrests per 100,000 residents. D.C. ranked third at 499.2.

Arizona, meanwhile, fell out of the top 10. Its reported drug arrests dropped from 39,320 in 2024 to 28,157 in 2025, pushing its rate down 28.8%, from 518.6 to 369.3 per 100,000.

The high-rate states were also overwhelmingly policing possession rather than sale or manufacturing. Possession accounted for 96.2% of South Dakota’s reported drug arrests, 91.4% in Idaho, 90.5% in Wyoming and 88.4% in North Dakota.

State policy may help explain some of that footprint. Several of the highest-rate states retain relatively strict possession laws, and in South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho, at least nine in 10 reported drug arrests were for possession.

Another way to look at drug enforcement is to ask how much of a state’s overall arrest activity was tied to drug/narcotic offenses.

Pennsylvania ranked highest by this measure. Drug/narcotic offenses made up 20.2% of all reported arrests in the state in 2025. Idaho and Wyoming followed at 19.8% and 19.1%, respectively.

This does not mean those states had the most drug arrests overall. It means drug arrests took up a larger slice of reported policing activity than they did elsewhere. 

Reported drug-arrest totals are still much lower than before the pandemic, but 2025 data shows that drug arrests are rising. 

Reported drug arrests rose 2.1% from 2024 to 2025. The national footprint remained concentrated: 10 states accounted for 54.4% of reported drug arrests, and some states still devoted a large share of reported arrest activity to drug/narcotic offenses.

For people and families dealing with substance use, those enforcement patterns are not abstract. Arrests can shape employment, housing, family stability and access to treatment long after a case begins.

At RehabNet, we look at drug enforcement alongside treatment because recovery is harder when public systems respond to substance use mainly through punishment. For more context on how drug policy helped expand incarceration in the U.S., see our guide to the War on Drugs and mass incarceration.

RehabNet analyzed reported Drug/Narcotic Offenses arrest counts from the FBI Crime Data Explorer API for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for 2024 and 2025. The analysis uses reported arrest counts, not FBI-estimated national totals.

Arrest counts represent reported arrest events in the FBI’s drug/narcotic offense category. They are not unique people, convictions, charges filed or measures of drug use prevalence. We did not inflate or impute arrest totals for agencies that did not report.

We calculated each state’s 2025 share of the national reported total, 2025 reported drug arrests per 100,000 residents, drug arrests as a share of all reported arrests, and the change in reported drug arrests from 2024 to 2025.

FBI data quality note: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program shifted from the Summary Reporting System to NIBRS-only data collection beginning January 1, 2021. Both years analyzed here are post-transition, but agency participation and reporting completeness still vary by state and year. Year-over-year changes should therefore be read as changes in reported arrests, not a clean measure of enforcement activity alone.

Our QA review found that the extract passed the implemented checks against the saved FBI API responses. The main limitation is reporting coverage and participation, not a failed extraction or transformation. Coverage fields are retained in the dataset, and jurisdictions below 90% coverage are flagged in the ranking tables.

Source links: FBI Crime Data Explorer; FBI NIBRS overview; BJS NIBRS Estimation Program; Filter reporting on FBI drug-arrest data limitations.

The table below includes the core 2025 state-level measures used in this analysis. Annual population coverage is retained in the source dataset and noted above where it materially affects a ranking.