1/5 or 20% of people currently incarcerated are for non-violent drug use. This article tries to downplay it by reversing the statistic saying 4/5's aren't non-violent drug offenders. So about ~450k are incarcerated for non-violent drug possession in any given day.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Our prison inhabitants really started spiking in the 1980s, so anyone born after that doesn't know a different world other than what we have now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...