The Second Amendment Protects Drug Users, Too

Today’s unanimous decision on gun ownership by the Supreme Court serves to remind that the right to keep and bear arms is constitutional bedrock on a par with any other provision in the Bill of Rights. Even habitual users of marijuana can take shelter under the Second Amendment, the justices ruled in United States v. Hemani, limiting a federal gun control law that sought to bar drug users from owning firearms. The constitutional dispute arose in 2022 when federal agents raided the Dallas-area home of Ali Hemani, 25. The federales had searched Hemani’s home over potential ties to terrorism, but came up short. They did, though, find a pistol and about two ounces of marijuana. Based on his admission of using marijuana “every other day,” federal authorities charged him with violating a law that forbids an addict or “unlawful user of ” a “controlled substance” to possess a firearm.The same provision in federal law, incidentally, was applied to prosecute and convict in 2024 President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Mr. Biden père ended up pardoning his son. No such luck for Hemani, though, as Justice Neil Gorsuch chronicled in his opinion for the high court’s majority. Uncle Sam sought “to prosecute him, imprison him for up to 15 years, and disarm him for life,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, just for owning a gun as a drug user.This prosecution, Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the high bench concluded, was not “consistent with the Second Amendment.” The finding reflects the reasoning that the federal government is restrained from treading on the civil liberties in the Bill of Rights. After all, drug users face no such hurdle in the exercise of their First Amendment rights, say, to free speech, or to peaceably assemble. Nor are drug users exempt from the right to, say, a jury trial.Viewed in this lens, it’s gratifying to see a unanimous high court put the Second Amendment on the same plane as other bedrock rights. That aligns with the reasoning of Justice Clarence Thomas, who in the Bruen ruling marked that the Second Amendment does not amount to “a second-class right.” Justice Gorsuch warned that “when the government crosses the line from permissible regulation into unconstitutional infringement, courts have a duty to say so.”This is true, Justice Gorsuch said, “no less in the Second Amendment context than in any other.” The high court ruling found fault, too, with the federal law at play in Hemani on grounds of its vagueness. This vindicated the argument of Hemani’s lawyers. “Is someone who uses a controlled substance once a year ‘an unlawful user’?” Hemani’s lawyers asked. “What about someone who uses that substance every six months, or every two weeks?” This lack of specificity, Hemani’s lawyers asserted, risks giving too much power to the federal government. Indeed, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “it is far from obvious” that the law “confines its reach to those who are categorically and unusually dangerous.” This is especially true in light of rising marijuana use among Americans, Justice Gorsuch added, a trend that “the federal government has not just tolerated,” by relaxing punishments, but has “helped fuel.”The Hemani ruling does not “address efforts to ban addicts,” per Justice Gorsuch, or “those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm.” Yet Hemani vindicates what, in the Second Amendment, is best seen as “the true palladium of liberty,” as St. George Tucker put it. For while “the right of self defence is the first law of nature,” Tucker added, “in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.”

The Second Amendment Protects Drug Users, Too

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