What the Supreme Court’s Gun-and-Marijuana Case Could Mean for Millions of Cannabis Users

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On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that forces millions of Americans to choose between two things most people assume they can do legally: use cannabis in states where it’s permitted and own a firearm for self-defense. The case is United States v. Hemani. Depending how the justices rule, it could either validate or demolish a federal law that criminalizes an estimated 52.5 million Americans who’ve used marijuana—including people following their state’s laws to the letter.

Federal law, specifically a federal law that prohibits drug users from owning guns, criminalizes any “unlawful user” of a controlled substance who possesses a firearm. Marijuana remains in the most strictly controlled category of illegal drugs under federal law, the same category as heroin. So even if you’re a registered medical marijuana patient in, say, Colorado, buying cannabis legally from a licensed dispensary with a doctor’s prescription, the federal government considers you an unlawful drug user. And if you own a gun? That’s a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

As of mid-2025, 39 states have legalized medical marijuana, including 24 states that also allow recreational use (meaning 15 states have medical-only programs). Roughly 19 percent of Americans have used cannabis in the past year, and 88 percent support legalizing it for either medical or recreational purposes. Yet every single one of those users is technically barred from owning a firearm under federal law.

ATF Form 4473 and the Felony Trap

Federal law requires purchasers to complete ATF Form 4473, which asks directly: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

The form includes a warning in bold: marijuana use “remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside.”

Being honest and answering yes means you can’t buy the gun. Answering no while using legal state cannabis creates a separate federal felony—lying on the form itself, punishable under 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(6). Gun dealers in legalization states are stuck enforcing a prohibition on conduct their state governments have explicitly authorized and regulated.

How One Texas Case Reached the Supreme Court

Ali Danial Hemani wasn’t trying to make constitutional history. FBI agents executed a search warrant at his Texas home as part of an investigation into activities allegedly related to Iran. They found a Glock 9mm pistol in his closet, about 60 grams of marijuana, and 4.7 grams of cocaine.

Federal prosecutors charged him with violating § 922(g)(3)—possessing a firearm as an unlawful drug user. Hemani’s lawyers argued the charge violated the Second Amendment under the framework established in the 2022 decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Bruen changed how courts analyze gun laws. Before that decision, courts used a balancing test—weighing the government’s interest in public safety against the burden on gun rights. The Court threw that out. Now, when the Second Amendment’s text covers someone’s conduct, the government must prove the restriction is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The restriction must be historically grounded in how Americans regulated guns in the founding era and the decades after the Civil War.

That’s a difficult test to meet when defending a 1968 statute prohibiting gun possession by drug users—a category of restriction that didn’t exist in 1791 or 1868.

The district court dismissed the charges against Hemani. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, noting that the government had conceded it couldn’t distinguish Hemani’s case from United States v. Daniels, where the same court had already struck down § 922(g)(3) as applied to a regular marijuana user who wasn’t intoxicated when possessing a firearm.

The Trump administration’s Justice Department, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, petitioned for review in June 2025. The Court agreed to hear the case in October after discussing it at multiple conferences, scheduling arguments for March 2026.

Historical Precedent and the Government’s Problem

Under Bruen, the government needs to show that disarming habitual drug users—regardless of whether they’re impaired—fits within America’s historical tradition of gun regulation. The arguments don’t hold up.

The government points to founding-era laws against “going armed to terrorize” and nineteenth-century statutes that temporarily disarmed people based on financial guarantees when they posed specific threats. But as the Fifth Circuit noted in Daniels, those laws targeted people who were currently dangerous or currently intoxicated. There’s no historical tradition of maintaining a registry of everyone who ever drank alcohol and categorically banning them from owning weapons forever. Historical intoxication laws addressed the acute danger of someone who was drunk right now carrying a weapon in public, not the theoretical future risk posed by anyone who drinks.

The government has also tried analogizing to historical laws disarming the mentally ill. As the Court clarified in its 2024 decision United States v. Rahimi, even domestic violence restraining orders—which address serious danger—require an individualized finding of threat before someone loses gun rights. You can’t declare an entire category of people dangerous based on status alone.

That’s the constitutional problem with § 922(g)(3). It’s a categorical ban based purely on drug use status, with no requirement that the person be impaired, dangerous, or subject to any individualized assessment of risk. A medical marijuana patient using cannabis under doctor supervision for chronic pain is treated identically to someone with a severe addiction who poses an obvious danger. The law draws no distinctions.

What Research Shows About Gun Violence and Cannabis

Nicholas Goldrosen conducted data-based research comparing states that legalized marijuana to those that didn’t, from 2010 through 2020. He looked at gun deaths, homicides, suicides, firearm sales, and federal gun prosecutions. Marijuana legalization had no statistically significant effect on any of those outcomes. States that legalized cannabis didn’t see increases in gun violence or more gun purchases.

This doesn’t resolve the constitutional question—Bruen requires historical analysis, not cost-benefit studies. But when cannabis legalization doesn’t increase gun violence, what exactly is the federal ban preventing?

Real-World Consequences of the Prohibition

Cannabis dispensaries operate almost entirely in cash because marijuana remains federally illegal, which means banks won’t serve them. That creates attractive targets for armed robbery. In Washington state alone, there were over 70 armed robberies at cannabis dispensaries in less than 90 days in 2025, with three fatal shootings in a single week in March.

The business owners and employees getting shot at can’t legally arm themselves for self-defense. Working in the cannabis industry categorizes you as an “unlawful user” under federal law. Owning a dispensary creates the same problem. The legal businesses operating under state licenses and regulation are uniquely vulnerable to violent crime because their legal status under state law prohibits them federally from defending themselves.

The cannabis industry exceeded $29 billion in revenue in 2025. It’s a major industry that states have chosen to legalize and regulate, and the people working in it are being told they have to choose between their livelihood and their ability to own a weapon for any purpose.

Possible Supreme Court Outcomes

The Court could rule several different ways, each with dramatically different consequences.

They could uphold § 922(g)(3) entirely, holding that the government has met its burden under Bruen and that the categorical prohibition on gun possession by drug users is constitutional. That would require finding historical support that lower courts have consistently said doesn’t exist.

They could strike down the statute as unconstitutional, either entirely or in certain situations. That would eliminate the federal prohibition and force Congress to write a narrower law to restrict gun possession based on drug use.

There’s a middle path. Some legal scholars have suggested the Court could interpret § 922(g)(3) more narrowly using a legal principle that says ambiguous criminal laws should be interpreted in favor of defendants. Under this approach, they could hold that “unlawful user” means someone who is impaired by drugs, not anyone who has ever used them or uses them regularly when not handling weapons. That would preserve the statute for cases involving intoxication while eliminating the categorical ban on habitual users.

Congressional Response and Recent Developments

Multiple bills have been introduced attempting to address the cannabis-gun conflict, though none have passed.

The Gun Rights And Marijuana Act (GRAM Act), introduced in 2021 and reintroduced in subsequent sessions, would explicitly allow people in states with legal cannabis to possess weapons. The Veterans Equal Access Act, which came closest to passage in fall 2025, would let veterans use medical marijuana without losing VA benefits—though it wouldn’t resolve the gun question.

In December 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to expedite rescheduling marijuana from Schedule I to a less strictly controlled category. That wouldn’t legalize recreational use, but it would acknowledge medical utility. Placing marijuana in the same category as ketamine and anabolic steroids complicates the justification for treating all marijuana users as categorically unfit to own weapons.

Federal Power and Constitutional Rights

Strip away the specifics of guns and cannabis, and Hemani asks a fundamental question: Can the federal government prohibit you from exercising a constitutional right based on conduct that is completely legal under your state’s law?

Upholding the prohibition establishes that the federal government can restrict constitutional rights based on state-legal conduct. That has implications beyond this case. It means federal law can override state policy choices even when those choices involve activities states have explicitly decided to permit and regulate.

Striking down or significantly limiting the prohibition establishes the opposite principle: at least some federal restrictions can’t survive constitutional scrutiny when applied to people engaged in legal, state-authorized conduct. That could affect other areas where state and federal law conflict regarding rights and restrictions.

The case also tests whether the test the Supreme Court created that requires laws to match historical gun regulations can function when applied to modern regulatory questions. Cannabis and weapons both existed in the eighteenth century, but the modern regulatory state’s approach to both is unrecognizable compared to the founding era. Federal judges have repeatedly complained that Bruen requires them to conduct historical research they’re not trained to do, searching for eighteenth-century analogues to twenty-first-century problems.

Who This Affects

Medical marijuana patients using cannabis for chronic pain, PTSD, anxiety, and other conditions face a choice: their medicine or their ability to own a weapon for self-defense. There’s no medical exception. A cancer patient using cannabis to manage chemotherapy side effects is treated the same as someone with a substance abuse problem.

Recreational users in the 24 states where cannabis is legal face the same choice. Living in Colorado and occasionally using legal cannabis products sold in licensed dispensaries means you’re federally prohibited from owning a gun. Not because you’ve been convicted of a crime. Not because a court has found you dangerous. Because you’re exercising a right your state has given you.

Gun dealers in legalization states are stuck enforcing a prohibition they have no practical way to verify. How is a dealer in Oregon supposed to know whether a customer uses legal cannabis? The state doesn’t maintain a registry of recreational users. Medical marijuana registries exist in some states, but using those registries to deny gun purchases raises its own constitutional problems.

Federal prosecutors have an easy charge to add whenever they find guns and marijuana together. That’s useful for prosecuting people engaged in other criminal activity, but it also means that discovering legal-state cannabis during a search automatically creates a federal felony when a gun is present. That’s what happened to Hemani—the FBI was investigating something else entirely, but he got charged with a gun crime because they found both a weapon and marijuana.

Timeline and Immediate Consequences

Oral arguments are scheduled for March 2, 2026. The Court typically issues decisions in argued cases by the end of June, so expect a ruling by late June or early July 2026.

Whatever they decide will reshape the legal environment immediately. Upholding the prohibition means millions of cannabis users will remain in legal limbo—technically federal criminals for owning weapons, even while complying with state law. Striking down or narrowing the prohibition means federal prosecutors lose a charging tool, gun dealers get clarity on who can purchase weapons, and cannabis users in legalization states can exercise Second Amendment rights without choosing between state-legal conduct and federal law.

The case will clarify how Bruen‘s historical tradition test applies to drug-related gun restrictions, which will affect other challenges to § 922(g)’s various prohibited-person categories. And it will establish precedent for how courts should handle conflicts between state-legal conduct and federal constitutional restrictions.

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