A meshless Element-Free Galerkin (EFG) method was used to directly simulate the fluidization process in two dimensions. The drag force on particles was obtained by integrating the stress and shear forces on the particle surfaces. The results show that meshless methods are capable of dealing with real particle collisions, thus are superior to most mesh-based methods in reflecting the fluidization process with frequent particle collisions and suitable void fractions. Particle distribution greatly influences the drag coefficients even for the same voidage, that is, there are large differences in the average drag coefficients between nonuniform and uniform particle distributions. Different compacting directions also have different regularities, so conventional formulas such as ‘Wen and Yu' and ‘Felice' models have some deviations in such nonuniform distributions. To evaluate the influence of the nonuniformity, the drag force in multiple particle systems was simulated by using nonuniformity coefficients, CVX and Cw, to quantitatively describe the nonuniform distribution in different directions. Drag force during fluidization can be successfully evaluated by the use of Cvx alone.