{"id":427,"date":"2026-06-18T18:06:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=427"},"modified":"2026-06-18T18:06:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T18:06:50","slug":"the-supreme-court-has-good-news-for-people-who-like-weed-and-guns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=427","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court has good news for people who like weed and guns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Do you like to smoke marijuana? Do you also enjoy firearms? If so, the Supreme Court has great news for you.<\/p>\n

Read more Why so many \u201cmillennial\u201d brands are dying<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court held in that the federal government may not categorically forbid an \u201cunlawful user\u201d of marijuana from possessing a gun. Hemani<\/em> also has fairly broad implications for many drug users.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Justice Neil Gorsuch notes in the majority opinion, the federal statute at issue in the case bars unlawful users of any \u201ccontrolled substance\u201d from possessing firearms. This law, he suggests, is far too broad, because it would rope in relatively innocuous drug users such as \u201ca husband who regularly takes his wife\u2019s prescription Ambien to sleep and a college student who routinely uses a friend\u2019s Adderall to cram for exams.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, under Hemani<\/em>, it appears that a wide range of people who use prescription medications or other drugs in ways that violate the law may now own guns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gorsuch\u2019s majority opinion does suggest that the government may ban some users of some drugs from possessing firearms if it can show that those drug users are likely to behave erratically or to otherwise endanger others. But all nine justices agreed that a categorical ban on gun possession by marijuana users goes too far. The justices split into a few different camps, however, on why the law at issue in Hemani<\/em> is unconstitutional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most notably, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, calls for her Court to overrule (2022), a chaotic decision that, as she writes, \u201cis unworkable,\u201d because it \u201cimposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer \u2018contested historical questions.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bruen<\/em> held that courts should determine whether a modern day gun law violates the Second Amendment by asking whether it is \u201crelevantly similar\u201d to a law that existed at the time when the Constitution was written. Lower courts have struggled to apply this framework, which exists only in Second Amendment cases, in large part because the Supreme Court has never articulated just how similar an old law must be to a new one for the new one to survive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indeed, the last time the Supreme Court decided a Second Amendment case, in (2024), Jackson quoted a dozen different lower court opinions begging the justices to explain how, exactly, Bruen<\/em> is supposed to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gorsuch\u2019s majority opinion in Hemani<\/em> is unlikely to allay these concerns. Instead of clarifying Bruen<\/em>, Gorsuch writes that \u201cwe have to \u2018exhaustive[ly] survey\u2019 the features that may render a modern law \u2018relevantly similar\u2019 to historical ones.\u201d The historical analysis in his opinion narrowly focuses on laws governing intoxicants, and is unlikely to offer much guidance to judges hearing unrelated Second Amendment cases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court\u2019s entire approach to the Second Amendment remains a train wreck, in other words. But anyone troubled by that reality can now comfort themselves, legally, by squeezing off a few rounds at their local firing range, and then enjoying a nice fat doobie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The people who wrote the Constitution drank a whole lot<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Under Bruen<\/em>, government lawyers who seek to defend a modern-day gun law must point to an older law that they think is similar to the new one. Judges \u2014 who are, again, operating under minimal guidance from the Supreme Court regarding how similar the two laws must be \u2014 must then determine if the new law is similar enough to the old law to allow the new law to be upheld.<\/p>\n

Read more I read JD Vance\u2019s new book. It reveals more than he realizes.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the Hemani<\/em> case, the Justice Department compared the modern law \u2014 a categorical ban on gun possession by any \u201cunlawful user\u201d of marijuana \u2014 to founding era laws that imposed certain restrictions on \u201chabitual drunkards.\u201d These laws did not actually target gun ownership directly \u2014 few early American laws did, as US states did not even have police forces at the founding and thus lacked the ability to disarm people except in limited circumstances. But DOJ argued that, if the framers recognized that people who use intoxicants can be dangerous and need to have their liberties restricted, then modern-day lawmakers can do the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, as Gorsuch persuasively argues, these habitual drunkard laws were much narrower than the modern-day law at issue in Hemani<\/em>, which applies broadly to a wide range of drug users who are neither dangerous, nor even particularly impaired, because of their drug use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gorsuch writes that 18th- and 19th-century habitual drunkard laws applied only to people who drink so often that they become a burden on society and are often unable to manage their own affairs. Among other arguments, Gorsuch quotes Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, who said that if he were an habitual drunkard, it would mean that \u201c\u2018were a keg of rum in one corner of a room, and were a cannon constantly discharging balls between me and it, .\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gorsuch also quotes 19th-century laws such as an Arkansas law defining an habitual drunkard as someone who is \u201cincapable of conducting [his] own affairs,\u201d and a Connecticut law that describes these individuals as someone who has \u201clost the power of self-control.\u201d And he notes that the framers were unlikely to have supported more expansive restrictions on drinkers because many of them consumed copious amounts of alcohol. \u201cSome say James Madison \u2018consumed a pint of whiskey daily,\u2019\u201d Gorsuch writes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An habitual drunkard, in other words, was someone with a very serious addiction that makes them potentially dangerous to themselves and others. That\u2019s quite different from an occasional marijuana user who quietly smokes a joint in the comfort of their own home. As Gorsuch writes, the federal law in Hemani<\/em> is so broad it may even apply to someone who uses \u201ca mild gummy as a sleep aid a few times a week.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So the gun law at issue in Hemani<\/em> is pretty dissimilar to the \u201chabitual drunkard\u201d laws that the government pointed to in order to defend that law. Fair enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What Hemani<\/em> does not do, however, is provide any framework explaining how similar modern-day gun laws generally must be to their 18th- or 19th-century counterparts in order to survive Second Amendment review. Bruen<\/em> is likely to continue to baffle lower court judges, in large part because every single one of the Court\u2019s Second Amendment cases rely on ad hoc reasoning about whether one law is sufficiently similar to another. There are few broader legal principles to be extracted from the Court\u2019s historical analysis in any of these cases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That said, Gorsuch\u2019s opinion does contain one sentence that may give lower courts some guidance in future gun cases. Near the end of the opinion, he suggests that historical laws \u201cusually provided some form of process before an individual lost any of his liberties, even temporarily.\u201d So that does suggest that the government must provide individuals with a hearing before they can be stripped of their gun rights. The law at issue in Hemani<\/em> fails this test, because it purports to remove someone\u2019s right to own a gun the minute they become an illegal user of certain drugs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This one line aside, however, Hemani<\/em> contributes little to the broader project of clarifying which gun laws are permissible and which ones are forbidden. It is good news for people who enjoy both guns and marijuana. But it is terrible news for judges struggling to apply Bruen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more The state that will tell us who\u2019s winning the Democratic civil war<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
    \n
  • Criminal Justice<\/li>\n
  • Gun Violence<\/li>\n
  • Marijuana Legalization<\/li>\n
  • Policy<\/li>\n
  • Politics<\/li>\n
  • Supreme Court<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    United States v. 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