Supreme Court Says Marijuana Use Alone Can’t Bar Gun Ownership

Millions of Americans who use marijuana and own a firearm gained a measure of legal protection on June 18, 2026, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the federal government cannot strip a person of gun rights based solely on his marijuana use. The justices affirmed a lower court and threw out the prosecution of a Texas man who admitted using cannabis a few times a week, finding it violated his Second Amendment rights.

The decision in United States v. Hemani is a defeat for the Trump administration’s Justice Department, which had defended the gun ban even as the same administration moved to loosen federal marijuana restrictions. Writing for the Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that the government cannot disarm a regular marijuana user without showing he is actually dangerous.

A narrow ruling, not a full strike-down

The opinion is deliberately limited. It does not erase the federal law — a provision of the 1968 Gun Control Act, expanded by a 1986 amendment — that bars anyone who unlawfully uses a controlled substance from possessing a gun. A conviction can carry up to 15 years in prison and a lifetime firearms ban, and it is the same law used to convict Hunter Biden before his father pardoned him.

What the Court rejected was the government’s sweeping theory: that any regular user of any controlled substance can be automatically disarmed, regardless of how much he uses, what effect it has, or whether he has ever posed a danger. The government, Gorsuch wrote, asked the justices to treat everyone who regularly uses marijuana as “categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing” — a power so broad it would let the government swallow the Second Amendment whole.

Gorsuch was careful to mark what the ruling leaves alone. It does not address bans on people who are addicted or presently intoxicated, prosecutions backed by individualized proof that a defendant’s drug use makes him dangerous, or the separate ban on gun possession by convicted felons. Those questions, the Court said, were not before it.

The case behind the decision

The ruling grew out of the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani, a dual U.S.-Pakistani citizen living near Dallas. FBI agents searching his family home in 2022 found a handgun, marijuana, and a small amount of cocaine, and Hemani told them he used marijuana about every other day. He had drawn federal scrutiny over alleged foreign ties, but he was charged only with possessing a firearm while being an unlawful drug user — and was never accused of being intoxicated when he had the gun.

A federal district court dismissed the charge, and the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit upheld that dismissal, holding the ban could not reach someone who was not under the influence at the time. The Justice Department appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in October 2025, with arguments in March 2026.

To defend the ban, the government leaned on the test the Court adopted in its 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, which requires modern gun laws to be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. It pointed to founding-era laws that disarmed “habitual drunkards.” Gorsuch found the analogy failed: those laws targeted different people, for different reasons, and worked in different ways, and so could not carry the government’s burden under Bruen and the Court’s 2023 refinement in United States v. Rahimi.

Rescheduling undercut the government’s own case

For Gorsuch, the federal government’s recent retreat on cannabis enforcement made its position harder to defend. The opinion noted that after oral argument, the administration moved some marijuana products to a less restrictive federal tier — a category reserved for drugs with accepted medical use — leaving its broad disarmament theory inconsistent with the government’s own regulatory actions.

That April 2026 action reclassified state-licensed medical marijuana and FDA-approved cannabis products as less dangerous, while most other cannabis stayed in the most restrictive federal category. Gorsuch also pointed to years of declining federal enforcement: the number of people sentenced for federal marijuana possession has dwindled as most states legalized the drug in some form. The federal government had not merely tolerated that shift, he wrote, it had helped drive it — leaving it poorly positioned to call millions of marijuana users uniquely dangerous.

The unanimous result masked real disagreement over reasoning. Justice Clarence Thomas questioned Congress’s power to regulate guns based only on their having crossed state lines at some point. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, argued the Bruen framework itself is unworkable and invites arbitrary results. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan agreed only with the outcome, finding the government had failed to show a marijuana user like Hemani is incapacitated the way founding-era drunkards were.

What it means for cannabis consumers

The practical takeaway is that marijuana use, on its own, is no longer enough to support a federal gun prosecution within the reach of this decision. Future cases will require prosecutors to show more — evidence that a defendant’s drug use actually makes him a danger. The American Civil Liberties Union, part of the team representing Hemani, called it a win for millions of consumers, with legal director Cecillia Wang saying the government can no longer treat people as criminals “simply because they use marijuana.” Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which had urged the justices to keep the ban, condemned the outcome.

The ruling lands alongside other shifts already underway. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives proposed a revised gun-purchase form in May 2026 to reflect medical marijuana’s new federal status, and a separate ATF rule narrowing who counts as an “unlawful user” is open for public comment through June 30, 2026. States have been moving on their own track for years — Maryland shielded medical marijuana patients’ gun rights in 2024, while Hawaii has denied more gun permits over medical cannabis than for any other reason.

For now, the broad drug-user gun ban stays on the books, weakened but intact. The question the Court left open — when, exactly, drug use makes someone too dangerous to own a gun — is the one the next round of cases will have to answer.