Biden Administration Insists That Cannabis Consumers Have No Right to Arms

The Biden Administration still insists that cannabis consumers have no right to arms: As pot prohibition collapses across the country, that policy is increasingly untenable.

Medical Marijuana
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Washington, DC – -(AmmoLand.com)- After Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize recreational marijuana last week, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued a familiar warning. Minnesotans who might be inclined to consume cannabis supplied by state-licensed stores, the ATF office in St. Paul said, should recognize that doing so means sacrificing the constitutional right to armed self-defense.

That puzzling predicament, the result of restrictions imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968, is untenable in a country where most states allow medical or recreational marijuana use, and two-thirds of adults support full legalization.

Yet even though President Joe Biden says cannabis consumers should not be treated as criminals, his administration is desperately defending a policy that punishes them by taking away their Second Amendment rights.

Marijuana users who try to exercise those rights are subject to severe federal penalties, including up to 15 years in prison for buying or possessing a firearm. If they deny marijuana use on the ATF form required for gun purchases from federally licensed dealers, that is another felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

A law that Congress approved last year added yet another penalty: up to 15 years for “trafficking in firearms.” Counterintuitively, Congress defined that crime broadly enough to cover any “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance,” including marijuana, who obtains a firearm.

Can this situation be reconciled with a constitutional provision that guarantees “the right of the people” to “keep and bear arms”?

To pass muster under the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court says, a gun control law must be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In trying to meet that test, the Biden administration has cited 18th- and 19th-century laws that prohibited people from publicly carrying or firing guns while intoxicated. But that analogy is inapt because the restriction that the government is defending is much broader.

The law that the ATF highlighted last week applies to cannabis consumers even when they are sober, and it prohibits private as well as public gun possession. A truly analogous law would impose a blanket ban on gun ownership by drinkers, a policy that would be plainly inconsistent with the Second Amendment.

The early laws that the Biden administration cites, a federal judge in Oklahoma observed last February, “took a scalpel to the right of armed self-defense” by “narrowly carving out exceptions but leaving most of the right in place.” By contrast, U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick wrote;

…the current federal rule “takes a sledgehammer to the right,” imposing “the most severe burden possible: a total prohibition on possessing any firearm, in any place, for any use, in any circumstance — regardless of whether the person is actually intoxicated or under the influence of a controlled substance.”

Two months later, a federal judge in Texas agreed with Wyrick that the government had failed to meet its constitutional burden. The early laws targeting drunken gun handling, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone said, were similar to contemporary laws against driving under the influence, which likewise aim to prevent people from “using dangerous equipment while intoxication might impair their abilities and judgment.”

If states instead sought to “prevent individuals from possessing cars at all if they regularly drink alcohol on weekends,” Cardone noted, no one would think that was analogous to current policy.

Unlike car ownership, of course, gun ownership is explicitly protected by the Constitution. Cardone joined Wyrick in rejecting the government’s claim that the “widespread practice” of unwinding with cannabis rather than alcohol “can render an individual so dangerous or untrustworthy that they must be stripped of their Second Amendment rights.”

Federal judges who have been more receptive to the Biden administration’s argument failed to seriously consider whether its historical examples are “relevantly similar” to current federal law. Those courts instead deferred to dubious policy judgments that make a fundamental right subject to legislative whims — precisely the situation that constitutional guarantees are meant to avoid.


About Jacob Sullum

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @JacobSullum. During two decades in journalism, he has relentlessly skewered authoritarians of the left and the right, making the case for shrinking the realm of politics and expanding the realm of individual choice. Jacobs’ work appears here at AmmoLand News through a license with Creators Syndicate.

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BeReady

They had the whole government for 2 years and they never legalized weed like they claim they wanted to – now you know why. they want to use it to uproot the 2A while also releasing pot dealers from federal prison. It’s a hammer – nothing else. Same reason they never did anything to legalize abortion – they like to use it as a scare tactic.

Rodoeo

Exactly!

gregs

i just wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper about the weaponization of big government over the civil rights of the people after the article yesterday about nikki fried, her firearm and weed smoking. i have no problem with firearms, pot, only leftist/progs like nikki. big government is the greatest enemy to the free people of any country. big government craves more and more power with which to wield over its citizens until total control is achieved. we need police reform, judicial reform and congressional reform in America. many police violate civil right whether they mean to… Read more »

Bubba

Drop mic.
Well said.

Dr. Strangelove

As a former addict, I have no use for drugs, legal or illicit. However, I see nothing in the constitution prohibiting them, except the failed 18th amendment.

Considerthis

So, that thing about ” pursuit of happiness ” was just a feel good ideal, not a promise ?

WeWereWarned

Sir, the pot smokers were a threat to the government during Nam, that is why it was reclassified. Think of that, how the drug users were harder to control and manipulate than useful idiots of the government, who were/are easily controlled with religion and greed.

One of the highest decorated 82nd Airborne Troopers in existence makes my truck smell like a skunk when we go out hunting.
I would love to see a conservative socialist cop safely tell him that he was no right to defend his family or himself because he smokes his now legal pot.

Last edited 9 months ago by WeWereWarned
Considerthis

With respect, I enjoy reading your posts and at the same time I find some of them confusing. Please explain how pot smokers were a threat to the government. Maybe you mean that since the potheads were nonagressive draft dodgers they impeded the government effort to use young men as cannon fodder ? Passive people may want to resist but governmental power can easily break the resistance of passive individuals. Illegal drug users tended to be fearful paranoids, after all they are breaking laws and easily identified and rounded up for incarceration. Hard core peaceniks fled to Canada. ” Hippies”… Read more »

Central PA Dan

Remove Marijuana from the schedule 1 list and treat it like alcohol. I don’t hear of anyone getting baked and committing crimes, unless they are against twinkies….

TGP389

I’m a retired police officer. I’ve NEVER used pot, but I tell people when discussing it that all my trouble calls were from people using alcohol, NOT marijuana.

swmft

they can be from either and crack or crystal meth look out, by far the worst was people having a bad trip on acid

Boz

I told you! When they started opening up states to cannabis use I said that they would eventually use it against gun owners if they used it. Here we are.

KenW

And this is exactly how they want it, because now THEY can prohibit a whole entire class of people just because they smoke pot.
The government also changed the wording on ATF From 4473, which use to sate “addicted to” to “unlawful user of” and now includes the prohibition of state laws in the text.

WeWereWarned

Drunks used force to stop the useful idiots of the government, who were using religion to harm Liberty and expand the government.
The pot heads have not used the 2nd Amendment to say no to the government enforcers, like good folks did during prohibition.

Ledesma

” A slap in the face to Africans of America everywhere”.

Last edited 9 months ago by Ledesma
Laddyboy

NOT EVERYONE!!

swmft

and some have a violent sycosis associated with it

Rodoeo

I’ve said this time and time again. Their plan is to make anyone who attempts to buy a firearm unable to ever again. They will use any and every means necessary. Red flags, constitutional violations, fine print, anything they can.

Considerthis

If you join the Firearms Policy Coalition, they send you a card with a motto I love – ” ALL THE RIGHTS. ALL THE TIME. “

Pa John

The easiest solution, it would seem, would be to simply change how marijuana is classified. Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 drug. Schedule 1 drugs are defined as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Even people who live under a rock out in the wilderness, will generally know by now about all of the people with legal medical prescriptions for marijuana these days, and it is hard to use the internet and have an active email account without at least occasionally being pestered with advertisements for medical cannabis oils and such. Marijuana… Read more »

swmft

obummer had some great collage photos getting stoned

TGP389

Hell, they insist NOBODY has a right to arms.

Yote Hunter

Joe might “brighten” up a little on ideas if he smoked some dope.
Sure didn’t hurt Bill Gates!

Obama started early in life being a pot head, and look where it took him!

Oh, wait a minute, being somewhere around 50% white, 37% African Arab, and 13% black , but claiming to be BLACK, took him everywhere he ever got, politically.
My bad.

Besides, being a BIDEN on drugs doesn’t seem to curtail any 2nd Amendment rights anyway, does it Joe???

Last edited 9 months ago by Yote Hunter
Bubba

I’ve been telling the world this since it appeared on the 4473.
The monkey Fucktard left has no interest in legalizing cannabis. Just like they have no interest in codification of roe v Wade.
They lose all tools in their worthless fuking toolbox.

FJB and FATF and Fevery progressive on the planet.
They all should be dropped 100 miles out to sea from 25,000 feet.

JNew

You can’t walk around drunk with a pistol, so I don’t see the difference. It’s bad enough that we now have to worry about (even more) potheads on the roads.

Last edited 9 months ago by JNew
Stag

You fell for the whole Refer Madness propaganda, didn’t you?

WeWereWarned

Pot doesn’t impair a person like booze, nor does it make the person only use emotional thinking, like booze.
I have never had to draw down on a pot head but I have on drunks.
You should grow up and quit supporting gun control.

Last edited 9 months ago by WeWereWarned
swmft

potheads are also bad drivers ,and i cant imagine someone on lsd driving

Deg4u
  • My experience with pot was when I was very. It made me relax more than anything else, drinking to much would more than likely get you hurt or killed. Seeing things was pots biggest thing, like when I had 7 to 8 people in a Grand Trino coming up to a bridge and when I got to it, it looked like a tunnel with people falling from the walls. So, for this little bit of using, I don’t think it is a cause of any accidents or any other problems.
OlTrailDog

There is a reason they call it dope. As the evidence indicating linkage between cannabis use and psychosis grows.

YankeeLivingintheSouth

Did you read the entire article?

Stag

Ah, yes, because we all know how trustworthy government agencies are.

Coelacanth

Pure propaganda. Watch “Reefer Madness” for a real hoot. You can’t even tell when someone has smoked Cannabis unless they’re reeking. Try again, dude.

YankeeLivingintheSouth

Guess you didn’t understand the article.

OlTrailDog

Honestly, I didn’t. I was aware of several studies referencing cannabis to psychosis and merely linked the article from the NIH. Personally, I’ve haven’t delved into any mental altering substances, drugs, alcohol, or etc., since 1981and I’m much the better for making that choice whether it is mental, physical, or relationship wise. If you want to be a drunk or doper that entirely up to you. Simply not for me, but drink, toke, snort, and swallow all to your heart’s content. To reiterate, there is a reason they call it dope.

swmft

and let us know what roads you are on so we can be a little safer

OlTrailDog

Frankly, I since I’m not a user or abuser, it would have been a complete waste of my time to read the article. Sort of like reading an article about the joys of owning a lama or goat packstring, when I have no desire to use one and know I never will.

Rodoeo

I think those are the really heavy, daily/hourly users who remain high constantly (or as much as they can possibly afford). Anything you abuse to that level can cause psychosis. But again, I guess that’s now up to our GOV to determine and weaponize.

Last edited 9 months ago by Rodoeo
swmft

a friends son is so bad that she can no longer have him at her house for any reason, starts grabbing stuff saying everything is his ( he was written out of her will daughter gets it all) the good book says all things in moderation untill someone finds it worth their while we will not know why pot like alcohol affects some people badly