

Despite the push for further marijuana legalization throughout the U.S., a new study finds that arrests for possessing small amounts of pot outnumbered those made for all violent crimes combined in 2015.

Individuals possessing small quantities of marijuana intended for personal use were arrested 571,641 times last year, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.

Law enforcement officials arrested citizens for pot at a rate 13.6 percent higher than the 505,681 arrests made for all violent crimes put together, including rape and murder.

“It’s been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared, and it hasn’t been a success,” lead author Tess Borden of Human Rights Watch said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Rates of drug use are not down. Drug dependency has not stopped. Every 25 seconds, we’re arresting someone for drug use.”

The report also found an imbalance in the arrests between certain races, as black adults were more than twice as likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite federal data that found similar rates of illicit drug use between black and white Americans.

“It is selective enforcement, and the example I like to use is that you have all sorts of drug use inside elite college dorms, but you don’t see the police busting through doors,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, to the New York Times.

The report concluded that the personal use and possession of drugs should be handled as a health-related concern and treated as such, rather than an illegal crime that deserves punishment.

“Rather than promoting health, criminalization can create new barriers to health for those who use drugs,” the report says. “Criminalization drives drug use underground; it discourages access to emergency medicine, overdose prevention services, and risk-reducing practices such as syringe exchanges.”