The Supreme Court handed gun owners a major Second Amendment win June 18, ruling that a Texas man’s regular marijuana use was not enough on its own to criminally charge him for owning a firearm.
The unanimous decision weakens part of a federal gun law that bars “unlawful” drug users from possessing firearms, while reinforcing the court’s recent push to force gun restrictions to line up with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
At issue was a provision of the Gun Control Act of 1968 that makes it a felony for anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to possess a gun.
The Justice Department defended the restriction, even as the Trump administration has moved to expand gun rights and reclassify marijuana into a less dangerous drug category.
Cannabis is now legal in some form in most states, though it remains restricted under federal law.
The government argued that barring a regular marijuana user from having a firearm is constitutional because the restriction ends once the person stops using drugs.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, described the ruling as narrow.
He said the decision does not decide whether the government can disarm addicts, keep guns away from convicted felons or prove that a specific person’s marijuana use makes him too dangerous to be armed.
But Gorsuch said the government cannot imprison someone or strip them of gun rights for life simply because they used marijuana a few times a week.
“In saying this much, we do not question that sometimes an individual’s unlawful use of marijuana (or any other controlled substance) may render him a danger to others,” Gorsuch wrote. “But, again, the government disclaims the need to show anything like that in this case.”
The US Supreme Court has just unanimously ruled IN FAVOR of a Texas man who had his gun rights stripped because he uses marijuana
“It was whether or not you could go after someone who you discovered was a habitual drug user in this case marijuana.” pic.twitter.com/aWVh1GNvX2
— USATodayFeed (@USATodayFeed) June 18, 2026
The case involved Ali Hemani, a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was being monitored by the FBI at the time of his arrest over alleged ties to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. government has designated as a global terrorist group.
During a 2022 search of Hemani’s Texas home, he told agents he owned a Glock 9 mm pistol and used marijuana “about every other day.”
Although the government initially sought to detain Hemani on more serious allegations, prosecutors charged him only with having a gun while being an unlawful user of marijuana.
A violation of that law carries up to 15 years in prison.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Hemani, saying the ban could not be applied to him under the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling requiring gun laws to be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The appeals court said history supports “some limits on a presently intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon,” but “they do not support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage.”
The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reverse that decision, arguing that founding-era laws restricted the rights of habitual drinkers even when they were sober.
Erin Murphy, Hemani’s attorney, argued the historical laws were meant to distinguish between people who drank and people who were drunkards.
She said the modern law sweeps too broadly “to capture something that is the type of thing that people regularly, all throughout the country, lawfully use a few days a week,” she said during the March oral arguments.
“And most states and the president have made the judgment that this is not so categorically addictive or dangerous that no one can use it safely,” Murphy said about marijuana.
Gorsuch rejected the government’s historical comparison, writing that the laws cited by the Justice Department did not match the modern restriction closely enough.
Gorsuch wrote that the historical laws the government cited “targeted different kinds of people, did so for different purposes, and operated in different ways.”
He also noted that if early laws had punished people merely for drinking regularly, some of America’s most famous Founders could have been in trouble.
“Had habitual drunkard laws applied to those who simply drank regularly,” he said, “many notable early Americans could have faced trouble.”
Gorsuch noted that John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider for breakfast and Thomas Jefferson enjoyed three or four glasses of wine at dinner.
The ruling drew support from gun rights groups, cannabis legalization advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union, all of which backed Hemani.
“With nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions and curbs the government’s ability to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties,” Cecillia Wang, legal director at the ACLU, said in a statement.
Gun safety groups sided with the Justice Department, arguing the provision is part of a broader system meant to keep firearms away from dangerous or irresponsible people.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued that the law is often used less as a public safety tool and more as leverage in prosecutions.
The group said the provision is used for selective prosecutions, plea pressure or “as a means of incarcerating otherwise law-abiding citizens when the government’s primary theory falls short.”
Hemani’s case, the group argued, illustrated that problem because the government could not make its more serious allegations stick and instead relied on a fallback charge tied to drug use and gun ownership.
The Justice Department says more than 300 people each year are charged with having a gun while being either an unlawful user of a controlled substance or a drug addict.
The department said the provision “plays an integral role” in laws designed to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous or irresponsible people.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The ruling also carries political weight because Hunter Biden, who was later pardoned by his father, President Joe Biden, was convicted in 2024 of violating the same law by buying a gun despite having a known drug addiction.
For gun rights advocates, the decision is another sign that the high court is not willing to let the government strip away Second Amendment rights based on broad categories without showing actual danger.
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