Supreme Court To Consider If Drug Users Can Own Guns

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a major Second Amendment case….

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether it is constitutional to prohibit habitual marijuana users from owning guns.

At the center of the case is a federal statute barring anyone deemed “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing guns. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that the law violates the Second Amendment in most applications, finding that the government failed to justify the restriction under the historical standard laid out in the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) urged the Supreme Court in June to reverse the decision and uphold the statute.

“By disqualifying only habitual users of illegal drugs from possessing firearms, the statute imposes a limited, inherently temporary restriction—one which the individual can remove at any time simply by ceasing his unlawful drug use,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the government’s petition. “This restriction provides a modest, modern analogue of much harsher founding-era restrictions on habitual drunkards, and so it stands solidly within our Nation’s history and tradition of regulation.”

The case involves Ali Hemani, a dual U.S.–Pakistani citizen, who was indicted for gun possession while habitually using marijuana. The FBI discovered a firearm and drugs in his home while investigating alleged links to Iran, though no terrorism or fraud charges were ultimately filed.

Heman first caught the FBI’s attention in 2019 when a search of his phone at the border “revealed communications suggesting that he was poised to commit fraud at the direction of suspected affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated foreign terrorist organization,” according to the government’s brief

Constitutional Stakes: Testing the Bruen Standard

The case is shaping up as a major test of how far the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen ruling extends. That landmark decision reaffirmed that any modern gun restriction must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Since then, several lower courts have struck down long-standing federal gun control laws that lack clear historical precedent—including those tied to drug use, domestic violence, and certain misdemeanor offenses.

For conservatives and defenders of the Second Amendment, this case represents a crucial opportunity to limit bureaucratic power and reaffirm individual rights. Many Republican lawmakers and gun rights groups argue that the federal ban discriminates against citizens exercising personal freedom in states that have legalized marijuana.

The case marks another flashpoint in the application of the Supreme Court’s new test for firearm restrictions. 

The government also noted that “at least 32 States and territories have enacted similar laws restricting the possession of firearms by drug users and drug addicts.”