The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Thursday that the federal government cannot criminally prosecute a man for possessing a firearm solely because he regularly smoked marijuana, a unanimous rebuke of a decades-old statute that once ensnared Hunter Biden and now faces serious constitutional limits. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the full Court, dismantled the government's attempt to equate modern marijuana users with founding-era "habitual drunkards," finding the analogy fails on every measure.
The case, U.S. v. Hemani, centered on Ali Danial Hemani, a dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen from Texas. Law enforcement searched his home and found a Glock 9mm pistol, marijuana, and cocaine. Hemani admitted he smoked marijuana every other day. Federal prosecutors charged him under the Gun Control Act's Section 922(g)(3), which makes it a crime for anyone "who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" to possess a firearm. The statute carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.
Hemani fought the charge. He argued that under the Supreme Court's 2022 framework, which requires gun regulations to have a genuine historical analogue in the American tradition, the government could not justify stripping his Second Amendment rights based on marijuana use alone. Every justice agreed.
The Trump administration defended the statute, pointing to colonial and early American laws that disarmed habitual drunkards as proof that the nation's legal tradition supported disarming drug users. Gorsuch, in his opinion, methodically rejected that comparison. As he wrote:
"Those laws, the government contends, demonstrate a tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing. But the government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider."
The historical drunkard laws, Gorsuch explained, "targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways." The gap between a colonial statute aimed at a specific, locally identified class of problem drinkers and a modern federal law sweeping up millions of Americans who use a substance now legal in over half the states was too wide for the Court to bridge.
Gorsuch drove the point home from the bench. He noted that John Adams was known to drink "a tankard of hard cider" with his breakfast, and that some accounts say James Madison "consumed a pint of whiskey daily." The founders who wrote the Second Amendment were not, apparently, teetotalers, and nobody proposed disarming them.
The Court has been issuing a string of consequential rulings this term, and this decision adds to a pattern of major outcomes reshaping the legal landscape on guns, federalism, and individual rights.
The decision does not wipe Section 922(g)(3) off the books entirely. Gorsuch was careful to note the Court was not addressing whether the government could bar addicts or people who are actively intoxicated from possessing firearms. Just the News reported that Gorsuch wrote the ruling "limits but does not fully remove the government's ability to restrict guns from drug users."
In other words, the government can still prosecute if it proves a defendant was using illegal drugs at the time they possessed a gun. What it cannot do is impose a blanket, lifetime firearms ban on anyone who has ever been a "regular user" of a controlled substance, without any showing of present danger or intoxication.
That distinction matters. The government's position, had it prevailed, would have left prosecutors free to charge anyone who admitted to periodic marijuana use, regardless of whether they were anywhere near impaired when they held a firearm. During oral arguments earlier this year, Gorsuch pressed the government's attorney on exactly this point. As Fox News reported, Gorsuch asked: "What if he took one [THC-laced] gummy bear with a medical prescription? He had one to help him sleep every other day. Disarm him for life?"
Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised similar concerns during arguments, stating: "With the marijuana, I just don't see anything in the scheme that actually reflects Congress's judgment that this makes someone more dangerous."
That skepticism ran across ideological lines. Even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned the government, noting that the law asked the Court to "trust Congress' legislative judgment" on whether drug users pose a risk "but that this test doesn't provide us a way to check that in any meaningful sense," as the New York Post reported from oral arguments.
While the vote was unanimous on the outcome, Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote separately to take aim at the very test the majority applied. Jackson called the 2022 Second Amendment historical tradition framework "unworkable" and urged her colleagues to overrule it.
That framework, established in the Court's landmark 2022 decision, requires the government to identify a historical tradition of firearm regulation that matches any modern gun restriction it seeks to enforce. It has become the central battleground in nearly every Second Amendment case since.
Jackson and Sotomayor have been consistent critics. Their complaint is not that the result in Hemani was wrong, but that the historical-analogy method forces judges into the role of amateur historians, sifting through centuries of colonial statutes to decide modern cases. The rest of the Court was unmoved. The framework remains intact, and, as this ruling shows, it continues to produce results that protect individual gun rights against federal overreach.
The term has been a busy one for the justices, with several rulings this spring catching Democrats off guard and reinforcing constitutional limits on government power.
No discussion of Section 922(g)(3) is complete without mentioning its most famous recent defendant. Hunter Biden was charged under the same statute for possessing a firearm while using crack cocaine. He was convicted, and then pardoned by his father, former President Joe Biden, before the case concluded.
The Hemani ruling does not undo Hunter Biden's pardon or revisit his case. But it does underscore an awkward reality: the statute the elder Biden's Justice Department once used to prosecute the younger Biden has now been found constitutionally deficient in its broadest application. The same law that made Hunter Biden a convicted felon, before his father intervened, was always constitutionally suspect. The Court has now said so.
The ACLU, which represented Hemani, seized on the breadth of the ruling. Cecillia Wang, the organization's legal director, said in a statement:
"With nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions and curbs the government's ability to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties. The court has sent a strong message that the government cannot criminalize the conduct of large numbers of people by making categorical and unfounded assumptions about whether they are dangerous."
The NRA and the ACLU found themselves on the same side of this case, an unusual alignment that reflects the kind of unexpected outcomes this Court has been producing with increasing frequency.
Gorsuch's opinion also flagged a tension the federal government has created for itself. As Just the News reported, Gorsuch noted that the federal government "has tolerated and even helped fuel marijuana legalization in over half of U.S. states," which "leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous."
That observation cuts to the heart of the matter. Washington has spent years looking the other way, and in some cases actively encouraging, state-level marijuana legalization. The federal government collects tax revenue from an industry it simultaneously treats as grounds for felony prosecution. Hemani's case exposed that contradiction, and the Court refused to let it stand.
The DOJ had also argued that the attorney general retains authority to restore an individual's gun rights on a case-by-case basis, suggesting the statute was not as sweeping as it appeared. The Court was unpersuaded. A constitutional right that depends on executive discretion for its restoration is not much of a right at all.
This term has already produced significant rulings touching on federalism and state authority, and the Hemani decision fits squarely into that pattern, a Court willing to hold the federal government to constitutional limits even when the political winds might blow differently.
The 1968 Gun Control Act provision at the center of this case was enacted in a different era, when marijuana was universally criminalized and the Second Amendment had not yet been recognized as an individual right. The legal landscape has changed dramatically. The Court's 2022 framework now demands that gun restrictions pass a historical test, and this one failed.
Hemani's prosecution is effectively over. The broader statute survives in narrower form: the government can still go after addicts and people caught with guns while actively intoxicated. But the era of blanket firearms bans for anyone who has ever used a controlled substance is finished.
Nine justices, appointed by presidents of both parties, spanning the ideological spectrum, agreed on that much. When the government tries to strip a constitutional right from millions of Americans based on conduct it has otherwise tolerated and even profited from, it should expect to lose. Unanimously.
