75% of Drug offences in England and Wales are cannabis possession

By Avinash Tharoor

New data shows that the vast majority of recorded drug offences in England and Wales are for drug possession, with cannabis possession offences making up the bulk.

On 17 April, the House of Commons Library published data on the 136,352 recorded drug offences that took place between April 2016 and March 2017 in England and Wales. According to these findings, around 83 per cent of all drug offences recorded by the police were for drug possession offences. Over 75 per cent of all recorded drug offences were for cannabis possession.

The government continues to criminalise thousands of people despite their own evidence showing that this policy is failing. In 2014, Home Secretary Theresa May commissioned a report in which researchers concluded that they did not “observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country”. May subsequently attempted to remove parts of the report that she did not agree with because she "didn't like the conclusions", according to Nick Clegg, who was deputy prime minister at the time.