Supreme Court Says Habitual Marijuana Users Can’t Be Banned From Owning Guns

The Supreme Court has delivered another win for gun-rights advocates, ruling that the Constitution protects the right of habitual marijuana users to own a firearm.

The justices ruled unanimously Thursday in favor of a Texas man who challenged a longstanding federal law making it a crime for a person who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to have a gun, saying the application of the law in his case ran afoul of the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms.

The decision is the latest pronouncement from the high court on gun rights since it ruled in 2022 that modern-day firearm regulations will be struck down unless they have an analogue in the founding era.

The new ruling is a loss for the Trump administration, which generally favors expansive gun rights but defended the federal law as an important tool to prevent obvious public safety risks posed by drug users’ having control of weapons.

Writing for seven members of the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the federal ban on any illegal drug “user” possessing a firearm was akin to founding-era laws disarming what the Justice Department described as “habitual drunkards.”

“The government’s analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider,” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch echoed a point he made at oral arguments in the case in March: Many of the nation’s founders drank regularly, so there’s no sign that the 18th century laws were targeting modest drinking, even on a daily basis.

“There was, in short, a ‘culture of copious drinking’ in early America,” Gorsuch wrote. He said the founding-era laws seemed to zero in on people whose “drinking rendered them practically incapable of managing their affairs” and he said that standard “hardly compares” to the government’s description of who could be charged for possessing a weapon under the current ban.

Gorsuch emphasized that the court’s ruling doesn’t address the same statute’s language banning drug addicts from possessing a weapon, nor does it preclude Congress from passing a law targeting an occasional user of a drug deemed particularly dangerous. The high court’s majority also stopped short of striking down the gun ban for users of illegal drugs, with Gorsuch suggesting that prosecutors might still be able to apply it to someone whose drug use “renders him a danger to himself or others.”

Second Amendment advocates criticized the law — which dates to 1968 — for failing to require evidence that someone was actually under the influence of drugs at the time the person possessed a firearm. They also noted it is murky about how heavy or recent drug use had to be to bring someone within the sweep of the ban.

Several federal courts had tried to clarify the law by instructing jurors that a person could only be convicted under the drug “user” provision of the statute if the person was a “habitual” user of illegal drugs, but that gloss on the law still left significant uncertainty.

The ruling Thursday came in the case of Ali Hemani, a Texas man charged with violating the statute after a search of his home turned up a Glock pistol, marijuana, and cocaine. A district court judge threw out the case and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, with both courts concluding that the law was unconstitutional when applied to someone who wasn’t actually intoxicated at the time of the alleged offense.

In 2023, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was charged with violating the same federal ban the justices ruled unconstitutional Thursday. An indictment accused him of possessing a revolver while being both an unlawful user of drugs and addicted to them. He also faced two other felony charges related to making a false statement when he bought the gun and, on a federal background-check form, denied being a drug user despite his years-long struggle with an addiction to crack cocaine.

At a jury trial in Delaware the following year,Biden was convicted on three felony gun charges. While he was awaiting sentencing,his father issued the younger Biden a sweeping pardon for any federal crimes he may have committed over an 11-year period.

Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan did not join Gorsuch’s opinion Thursday. Alito wrote a brief separate concurrence backing Hemani, but suggesting that portions of Gorsuch’s ruling went beyond what was needed to decide the case.

Alito emphasized that marijuana is quasi-legal in the U.S., since many states allow its sale and cultivation, even though it remains illegal under federal law. He said the government’s comparison to habitual drunkard laws were “too far afield” to permit a prosecution like the one before the court.

“Marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the founding,” Alito wrote, joined by Kagan. “It is widespread and increasingly considered socially acceptable in many quarters. And from

a practical standpoint, law enforcement widely tolerates the use of marijuana.”