Justices appear to be divided over how to apply historic laws regarding habitual drinkers to modern rules banning drug users from owning firearms.
Can marijuana smokers legally own guns? Supreme Court rules
Lower courts have ruled that past drug use does not violate the Second Amendment unless the gun owner is currently a high-level gun owner. The Department of Justice disagrees.
WASHINGTON – The drinking habits of the Founding Fathers were a factor at the Supreme Court on March 2 as justices debated whether using marijuana or other drugs made them too dangerous or irresponsible to own a gun.
As the government points to historic laws regarding habitual drinkers as support for modern gun control, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that in the 1700s, you had to drink heavily to be considered a habitual drinker.
John Adams drank tankards of hard cider for breakfast. James Madison reportedly drank one pint of whiskey a day. Thomas Jefferson considered three or four glasses of wine each night to be a modest amount, Gorsuch said.
“Are they all habitual drunkards who are properly disarmed for life under your theory?” a conservative judge asked a government prosecutor defending the prosecution of a man accused of possessing a gun despite regularly using marijuana.
Potentially large impact
The case has potentially major implications both for the tens of millions of Americans who use marijuana, a substance that is legal in some form in most states, and for lawmakers’ ability to regulate who can own firearms.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 makes it a felony for an “unlawful user or addict of a controlled substance” to possess a gun, but the Supreme Court recently said that gun restrictions are unconstitutional “unless consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country.”
How the justices rule in Monday’s case could not only affirm or invalidate the 1968 law, but also examine a historical tradition that has led to a proliferation of gun control challenges and much turmoil in lower courts since it was enacted in the 2022 ruling.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s liberal justices, expressed dissatisfaction with the test.
“I no longer understand how this works in any meaningful way,” she said.
Lower courts sided with drug users
At the center of the case is Ali Danial Hemani, a dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen who is suspected of having ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards paramilitary group and was being monitored by the FBI. The government has designated the security forces as a global terrorist group.
During a 2022 raid of his Texas home, Hemani told investigators he had a Glock 9mm handgun and said he used marijuana “almost every other day.”
The government tried to detain Hemani on more serious criminal charges, but he was charged only with being an illegal user of marijuana and possessing a firearm. Violating this law is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said the gun ban did not apply to Hemani.
This is supported by history and tradition, but there are certain limitations. the current The appeals court said that “the right of an inebriated person to bear arms cannot be recognized” and that it “does not support disarming a sober person solely on the basis of past drug use.”
Justice Department points out historic law regarding drinkers
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling, arguing that laws that existed at the time of the nation’s founding limited the rights of regular drinkers, even when sober.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed that the government can keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. But she questioned whether it should apply to all controlled substances.
“The THC levels are probably higher now, which could have bad mind-altering effects and lead to violence,” she said. “My concern is that I don’t think that kind of determination has been made here.”
Sarah Harris, a Justice Department attorney who argued the case, said there is at least “common sense that people who frequently use psychoactive substances are people who are at special risk of abuse, insofar as they do so habitually.”
Several justices asked Harris why the law should not be narrowed to apply only to drug addicts, instead of extending it to drug addicts.
“If a person uses heroin frequently, regardless of whether they are addicted to it or not, it is reasonable to conclude that they are extremely dangerous,” Harris said.
Marijuana may be reclassified
Erin Murphy, a lawyer representing Hemani, countered that the point of the historic law was to distinguish between drinkers and binge drinkers.
He said modern laws cannot be applied broadly enough to “capture the kinds of things that people all over the country use legally and regularly several days a week.”
Murphy pointed to the fact that President Donald Trump is moving to reclassify marijuana into a less dangerous drug category, adding, “And most states and the president have determined that it is not clearly addictive or dangerous and cannot be safely used by anyone.”
Gorsuch, a conservative judge who most strongly disagreed with the government’s position, said Hemani’s case was an odd one for the Justice Department to use to defend the law, given the possibility of reclassification.
“What do we make of the fact that marijuana is kind of illegal, and the fact that it’s kind of not illegal, and the federal government itself is at odds on this?” he asked.
Chief Justice John Roberts, one of the justices most sympathetic to the government’s position, raised practical concerns about courts having to decide on a case-by-case basis how dangerous and addictive certain drugs are.
“It seems to me that they are taking a fairly cavalier approach to the considerations that require expertise and the decisions that they leave to Congress and the executive branch,” he said.
A decision in United States v. Hemani is expected to be rendered by the summer.
