Reply #88: almost half a million people were arrested for pot each year in the 70s

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see also: http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/pot-arrests.htm

But I imagine sentencing was more lenient before the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the mandatory minimums of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and there's no question that the incarceration rate skyrocketed under Reagan's watch:

In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate