The Center for American Progress states that every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for drug possession. The number of Americans arrested for possession has tripled since 1980, reaching 1.3 million arrests per year in 2015—six times the number of arrests for drug sales. One-fifth of the incarcerated population—or 456,000 individuals—is serving time for a drug charge. Incarcerating people for drug-related offenses has been shown to have little impact on substance misuse rates. Instead, incarceration is linked with increased mortality from overdose.
