The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Thursday that the federal government cannot prosecute a Texas man for possessing a firearm while being a marijuana user, finding that the 1968 Gun Control Act provision violates the Second Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority in United States v. Hemani, dismantled the government's defense of the statute with a withering historical analysis, and an unforgettable detour into the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers.
The decision marks the latest expansion of Second Amendment protections since the Court's landmark 2022 Bruen ruling and lands squarely on a fault line where gun rights, drug policy, and federal overreach collide. It also produced one of the more unusual political coalitions in recent memory: the NRA and the ACLU lined up on the same side, both opposing the restriction, while the Trump administration found itself defending a law that gun-rights advocates have long viewed as constitutionally suspect.
Ali Hemani, the defendant at the center of the case, was charged after the FBI searched his family's home in Texas and found a Glock 9mm pistol, 60 grams of marijuana, and a small amount of cocaine. The federal statute, Section 922(g)(3), forbids any unlawful drug user from possessing a firearm. A violation is a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Hemani faced prosecution not because he used the weapon, not because he threatened anyone, but because he owned a gun while being a regular marijuana user.
Every justice on the bench agreed: that's not enough under the Constitution.
The federal government's core argument rested on an analogy to historical laws that disarmed "habitual drunkards." If the founding generation accepted stripping firearms from chronic drunks, the reasoning went, then Congress could strip them from chronic drug users too. Gorsuch and his colleagues found the comparison hollow on every count.
Breitbart News reported on the majority opinion, in which Gorsuch wrote:
"To square that expansive theory with the Second Amendment, the government invites us to draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards. 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 laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways."
The opinion left no room for ambiguity. The government "has not carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hemani complies with the Second Amendment."
As National Review noted, Gorsuch's opinion also observed that the statute operates with a bluntness that bears no relationship to actual danger: "It doesn't matter what controlled substance an individual uses, in what amounts he does so, or whether his drug use has ever made him a danger to himself or others."
That is the heart of the constitutional problem. The law drew no distinction between a violent addict and a person who takes a marijuana gummy before bed in a state where cannabis is sold legally. Both faced the same felony charge, the same 15-year maximum sentence, the same permanent loss of a constitutional right.
The oral arguments on March 2, 2026, foreshadowed the ruling's outcome, and produced some of the most memorable exchanges of the term. Gorsuch pressed Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris on whether the government's theory would have disarmed the very men who wrote the Constitution.
He noted that John Adams "took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day." James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment itself, "reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day." Gorsuch referenced Thomas Jefferson's consumption as well, then posed the question directly to Harris: "Are they all habitual drunkards who would be properly disarmed for life under your theory?"
The exchange sharpened when Gorsuch invoked the American Temperance Society's own standards from the founding era. As he put it: "The American Temperance Society said back in the day, eight shots of whiskey a day only made you an occasional drunkard. We have to remember the founding era, if you want to invoke the founding era, to be a habitual drunkard you had to do double that."
The point was not a history lecture for its own sake. It was a methodical demolition of the government's chosen framework. If the government wanted to rely on founding-era precedent, it had to reckon with founding-era reality, and that reality made its analogy look threadbare.
This ruling arrived during a packed June decision season that has already tested the boundaries of federal power across multiple areas of law.
The political dynamics of Hemani defied the usual left-right map. AP News reported that the NRA and the ACLU both opposed the restriction, while the Trump administration defended it alongside gun-control groups more typically aligned with Democrats. The ACLU's legal director, Cecillia Wang, said the organization was "deeply concerned with the potential of this statute to basically give federal prosecutors a blank check."
Gorsuch addressed the government's awkward posture directly in the majority opinion. Newsmax reported that he wrote: "Whatever one thinks of these developments, the federal government has not just tolerated them; it helped fuel them... All of which leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous."
Cannabis is now legal for recreational use in roughly half the states. The federal government has largely declined to enforce its own prohibition against state-legal marijuana operations for years. To then prosecute a man for owning a gun because he used a substance the government has effectively permitted, that contradiction was too much for even a single justice to accept.
The Court has been issuing a series of consequential rulings this term, and few have exposed the gap between federal law on the books and federal enforcement in practice quite as starkly as this one.
Justice Clarence Thomas joined the unanimous result but wrote separately to flag unfinished business. His concurring opinion warned about "other outgrowths of the federal ban" that he believes need correcting. The specifics of Thomas's concerns were not detailed in available reporting, but his track record suggests he sees Hemani as one step in a broader project of aligning federal firearms law with the original meaning of the Second Amendment.
Just The News reported that Gorsuch's opinion also drew a careful boundary: "We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm." The ruling, in other words, does not open the door to armed intoxication. It simply holds that the government cannot impose a blanket, permanent firearms ban on anyone who regularly uses a controlled substance without any individualized showing of danger.
That distinction matters. The government's statute made no effort to distinguish between a violent offender and a nonviolent user. It treated marijuana the same as heroin, a single use the same as chronic addiction, and a person with no criminal history the same as a convicted felon. The Court said that kind of categorical sweep cannot survive Second Amendment scrutiny.
The same statute at the center of Hemani was used to convict Hunter Biden in 2024 for possessing a firearm while being a drug user. The New York Post noted that the Biden case gave the legal challenge added political visibility, though President Biden pardoned his son before any sentence was served. The pardon rendered the conviction moot for Hunter Biden personally, but the constitutional question remained alive through Hemani's case.
During oral arguments, the skepticism toward the statute crossed ideological lines. Five justices, Gorsuch, Sotomayor, Jackson, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, asked pointed questions challenging the government's defense. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told the government's attorney: "It seems like you're asking us to trust Congress' legislative judgment on whether unlawful drug users pose a high risk of misuse, but that this test doesn't provide us a way to check that in any meaningful sense."
When liberal and conservative justices agree that a federal firearms restriction lacks constitutional footing, the law in question has a serious problem. And so it proved.
The unanimity of the decision stands in contrast to the heated political battles that often surround the Court. Some Democrats have called for expanding the Court or imposing term limits when rulings go against their preferences. But Hemani produced no dissent to complain about. Every justice, appointed by presidents of both parties, agreed the government overstepped.
The practical impact is significant. Millions of Americans use marijuana in states where it is legal. Under the old statute, every one of them who owned a firearm was technically committing a federal felony. That legal cloud has now lifted, at least as applied to users who are not addicts and not intoxicated at the time of possession.
Questions remain. The Court explicitly left open the possibility that narrower restrictions, targeting addicts or people who are intoxicated while armed, could survive constitutional review. Thomas's concurrence suggests he believes the Court should go further in future cases. And the broader implications for other provisions of the Gun Control Act remain to be litigated.
But the core message of Hemani is clear. The government cannot strip a constitutional right from millions of Americans based on a categorical label, without any showing that the individuals in question are actually dangerous. That principle should not have required a Supreme Court ruling to establish. The fact that it did tells you something about how far federal firearms law had drifted from the text it claims to respect.
The Court's recent decisions have increasingly required the federal government to justify its power rather than simply assert it. In Hemani, the government asserted, and nine justices said no.
When the men who wrote the Second Amendment drank a pint of whiskey a day and kept their muskets, a federal statute that disarms a man for owning a Glock and a bag of marijuana was never going to survive honest constitutional scrutiny. It just took 58 years for the Court to say so.
