Justices to hear case on gun ownership, drug use
By: Maureen Groppe
USA Today
WASHINGTON - Are pot smokers drug users only when they're high? And can they and other drug users legally own guns?
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The Supreme Court on October 20 [2025] agree to decide this question, accepting the Justice Department's appeal of a lower court's ruling that past drug use alone can't keep a person from having a gun under the Second Amendment.
..... The government's lawyers argued the ruling effectively guts a statue aimed at reducing gun violence by preventing unlawful drug users from wielding firearms.
..... Hunter Biden, who was preemptively pardoned by his father Joe Biden,was convicted in 2024 of violating the law by purchasing a gun despite having a known drug addiction.
..... The Justice Department's defense of the law is particularly notable as the Trump administration has sided with gun rights advocates in other cases. but the department asked the high court to reverse multiple lower court rulings about pot smokers and guns.
..... The government most wanted the justices to take a case involving a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was charged with unlawfully owning a Glock pistol because he regularly smoked marijuana.
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The FBI has been monition Ali Danial Hemani because of his alleged connection to Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which the government has designated a global terrorist group, according to filings. The government also alleges Hemani used and sold promethazine, an antihestamine used to treat allergies and motion sickness that can boost an opioid high, and used cocaine, although he was prosecuted based on his marijuana use.
..... Hemani's attorneys said the government is trying to "inflame and disparage" Hemani's character, and the only facts that matter are that he was not high when the FBI found the Glock 19 ion his Lewisville, Texas, home.
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Hemani was charged with violating the feudal law that prohibits the possession of firearms by a person who "is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance."
..... The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the law can't be applied to Hemani under the Supreme Court;s landmark 2022 ruling that gun prohibitions must be grounded in history that is "consistent with our tradition of gun regulations."
..... While history and tradition support "some limits on a presciently intoxicated person's right to carry a weapon," the appeals court said, they do not support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage."
..... The Justice Department argued that the appeals court got it wrong.
..... Laws that existed at the time the country was founded tiredest the right of habitual drinkers, even when they were sober, the government's lawyers argued.
..... "And for about as long as legislatures have regulated drugs, they have prohibited the possession of arms by drug use and addicts - not just by persons under the influence of drugs," the Justice Department said in a appeal.
..... Hemani's lawyers argue that the government's interpretation of the law makes no sense when an estimated 19% of Americans have used marijuana and about 32% own a firearm. That means millions of Americans are violating the law, they said in a filing.
..... The apples court, Hemani's lawyers said, correctly applied the Supreme Court's past decisions and "common sense" to rule that "history and tradition only supports a ban on carrying firearms while intoxicated."
..... In addition to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, two other appeals
courts have issued ruling that restrict use of the federal ban: Both courts assessments of defendants' drug use to determine it their rights could be restricted.