{"id":498443,"date":"2026-03-02T01:15:31","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T01:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/498443\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T01:15:31","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T01:15:31","slug":"marijuana-advocates-light-up-second-amendment-fight-at-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/498443\/","title":{"rendered":"Marijuana advocates light up Second Amendment fight at Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n A major Second Amendment case pending at the Supreme Court is firing up marijuana legalization<\/a> advocates who fear the Trump administration\u2019s defense of a 1968 gun ban could expose millions of recreational pot users to prosecution, even as a growing number of states relax their cannabis laws.\n <\/p>\n

\n The 6-3 conservative court will hear arguments Monday over a federal law<\/a> that makes it a crime for any American who is an \u201cunlawful user\u201d of a drug to own a gun. The appeal has again put President Donald Trump on the opposite side of the National Rifle Association<\/a>, and created an unusual alliance between Second Amendment groups and advocates for easing state and federal regulations for marijuana.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cCannabis users, by and large, are probably some of the least violent people in the country,\u201d said Joseph Bondy, a prominent criminal defense attorney<\/a> who co-wrote a brief for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. \u201cThere\u2019s something deeper and more invidious about attempting to disarm an entire class of people \u2014 millions and millions and millions of people who consume cannabis.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The case centers on Ali Danial Hemani, a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan, who was indicted in 2023 on a single count of violating the federal anti-guns-and-drugs law. Though the Justice Department accused Hemani of many things in its appeal last year \u2014 dealing drugs, using cocaine and sympathizing with Iran \u2014 his indictment dealt only with an FBI search that turned up a Glock 9mm pistol and 60 grams of pot.\n <\/p>\n

\n President Joe Biden\u2019s son, Hunter Biden, was convicted in 2024 of the same law<\/a> at issue in the Hemani case, though that case involved his addiction to crack cocaine. He was later pardoned by the president <\/a>during his final days in office.\n <\/p>\n

\n Roughly half of US states<\/a> have legalized small amounts of marijuana for recreational use and an even higher share of states<\/a> allow the drug to be used medicinally. Trump signed an executive order<\/a> in December to expedite the reclassification of marijuana, a move that would not legalize it but would increase research on medical uses.\n <\/p>\n

\n But the unwinding of pot prohibitions has not been free from controversy, and some of that debate has slipped into the Supreme Court appeal.
Several anti-marijuana groups submitted a brief asserting that as pot has become a more commercialized product \u201cits potency has soared\u201d and thus become more \u201cdeleterious to mental health.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The idea that certain people regularly using marijuana could become violent is geared to a 2024 decision from the Supreme Court that found that laws intended to keep guns<\/a> out of the hands of dangerous people<\/a> are likely to be consistent with the Second Amendment.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s a completely different drug these days,\u201d said Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which filed an amicus brief in the case supporting the Trump administration. \u201cThis is an intoxicating drug, and weapons and intoxication just don\u2019t go well together.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Mixing guns and drugs<\/p>\n

\n The Supreme Court has said far more about guns than it has about pot in recent years.\n <\/p>\n

\n In a landmark 2022 decision<\/a>, the court made it easier for Americans to carry handguns in public and required gun prohibitions to have some connection to US founding-era laws to sustain Second Amendment challenges. It clarified that historical test in a decision two years later<\/a>, upholding a law that bars people who are the subject of domestic violence restraining orders<\/a> from owning guns when they have been found to pose a credible safety threat.\n <\/p>\n

\n Those two cases have kicked up a hazy debate about colonial-era gun laws that dealt with guns and public drunkenness.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Justice Department told the Supreme Court that there is a \u201cwell-defined\u201d historic practice of punishing \u201chabitual drunkards,\u201d who early legislatures viewed as presenting \u201cheightened dangers of crime and violence.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThey classified drunkards as criminal vagrants subject to confinement in jail or workhouses, committed drunkards to lunatic asylums, and subjected drunkards to surety laws backed by threat of jail,\u201d US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices in court filings. That history, Sauer said, suffices to uphold the law.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Justice Department said only about 300 people have been charged with violating the law annually. A conviction can carry a 15-year prison sentence.\n <\/p>\n

\n Hemani\u2019s legal team, which includes both the American Civil Liberties Union and Erin Murphy, a prominent Supreme Court lawyer who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, dismissed the government\u2019s version of history.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere is no historical tradition in this nation of stripping anyone who consumes an intoxicant a few times a week of the right to keep a firearm in the home for self-defense,\u201d they told the court.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Gun Control Act of 1968,<\/a> enacted partly in response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., created classes of people the federal government could disarm, including those convicted of felonies or dishonorably discharged from the military. The text of the drug provision includes both people who are addicted to drugs and those who are an \u201cunlawful user.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n It does not require that people are intoxicated in the moment they encounter law enforcement and it does not distinguish between marijuana and other drugs such as heroin.\n <\/p>\n

\n Though the Supreme Court hasn\u2019t waded into the issue of marijuana legalization since 2005<\/a>, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a notable opinion five years ago that appeared to express exasperation with the current state of affairs.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOnce comprehensive, the federal government\u2019s current approach is a half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana,\u201d the conservative justice wrote<\/a> in a case involving a medical marijuana dispensary in Colorado the court declined to hear. \u201cA prohibition on intrastate use or cultivation of marijuana may no longer be necessary or proper to support the federal government\u2019s piecemeal approach.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The Justice Department laid out a series of allegations against Hemani in its appeal, claiming a search of his phone at the border in 2019 revealed he was prepared to commit fraud at the direction of affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.\n <\/p>\n

\n Prosecutors also say Hemani traveled to Iran to participate in a celebration of the life of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian official killed in a US drone strike in 2020. Text messages recovered from his phone showed that he misused and sold promethazine and that he found the prescription antihistamine addictive, court records show. When the FBI searched his family home, agents found 4.7 grams of cocaine.\n <\/p>\n

\n But when a grand jury indicted Hemani on the drugs-and-gun charge, it did so based on what the government described as his \u201chabitual use of marijuana.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Hemani declined an interview request through his attorneys.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe fact that this does involve marijuana is a significant part of this case,\u201d said Brandon Buskey, director of the ACLU\u2019s Criminal Law Reform Project, noting the shifting legal landscape in the states. \u201cThat alone, with respect to the public acceptance, sets it apart from other drugs with a different public perception.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n A federal district court in Texas dismissed the charge, pointing to the 2022 Supreme Court decision laying out the historic test. The conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision, holding in a brief decision that the historical record points only to laws that barred guns for Americans who are actively intoxicated or under the influence of drugs at the time of their arrest. The government, the court ruled, could not target habitual users.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOur history and tradition may support some limits on a presently intoxicated person\u2019s right to carry a weapon,\u201d a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit wrote in a related case in 2024<\/a>. \u201cBut they do not support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A major Second Amendment case pending at the Supreme Court is firing up marijuana legalization advocates who fear…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-498443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}