​​Unquestionably. The FDA-approved synthetic version of marijuana’s primary active compound, THC, is even prescribed by the Department of Defense and used by active members of the military despite the significant career disruption that results. This synthetic drug, however, is associated with “more negative effects,” “hangover effects,” and “greater paranoia” than the natural version. It also lacks what is described as the beneficial “entourage effect” of compounds that are found only in the plant itself.

18 US Code §922(g)(3) bars firearm possession by anyone who is “an unlawful user” of any controlled substance, and marijuana is currently scheduled as such a substance. This will remain true even if the recent decision to reschedule it is finalized, which would take several years and may not happen at all. 18 US Code §924(a)(8) allows for a penalty of up to 15 years in prison and/or a fine “under this title,” which is $250,000 as per 18 US Code §3571(b)(3). Furthermore, there is a potential additional punishment of 15 years and $250,000 for the separate crime of receiving a firearm “if the recipient knows or has reasonable cause to believe that such receipt would constitute a felony.” There is no exemption for those who obey the laws of their state, and actual current use is not even required. According to the Department of Justice, Any marijuana user is prohibited from possessing or purchasing a firearm while using marijuana and for one year after last use. [That] an individual is in possession of a medical marijuana user card is enough to establish an inference of current use…The following scenarios will be used to determine the disqualification period in regard to possession of a medical marijuana user card: 1. One year from the date of the medical marijuana user card’s expiration date; or 2. One year from the date of ‘admission’ of possession of the medical marijuana user card, if no expiration date is available; or 3. One year from the date the medical marijuana user card is relinquished (p. 6). There is likewise no exemption in federal law for merely buying or selling cannabis products, but the Department of Justice mostly refrains from directly interfering with such state-legal activities because of the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment—intended by its bipartisan authors to “prevent the Department from wasting its limited law enforcement resources on prosecutions and asset forfeiture actions against medical marijuana patients.” We know the authors’ intent because they were forced to reprimand the DOJ for its insistence on continuing to waste its resources this way, and though it was eventually forced to back off from prosecuting individual consumers for marijuana possession alone, the Department remains fully committed to destroying their lives over otherwise perfectly legal firearm possession.

Every purchaser of a firearm from a federally licensed dealer must attest that they are not “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana” and is warned that “use or possession of marijuana 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.” A current patient who answers truthfully would avoid prosecution by being physically prevented from buying a gun, but this is literally the only scenario in which members of the general public are spared from falling into a trap. The warning doesn’t mention that having an active medicinal license within the last year makes one an “unlawful user,” and those who buy from a private seller are not presented with any warning at all—and the same obviously goes for someone who already owns a firearm (or perhaps merely lives with a person who does) and obtains the cannabis license later. The government has perverse incentives to put people in prison, so we must protect ourselves by ensuring the laws on the books are strictly limited to actual wrongdoing.

Again, the Department of Justice explicitly desired to continue prosecuting cannabis patients even after Congress asked it to stop. Like all police and prosecutors, DOJ employees don’t get paid by how reasonable and forgiving they can be—their job is to put people behind bars, and a few key points should convince anyone skeptical that government agents are capable of doing anything and everything to excel. Official misconduct such as withholding evidence contributed to the conviction in 2,156 of 3,586 total exonerations since 1989, and it continues unabated because prosecutors are essentially never held to account. Despite hundreds of innocent people having been convicted even of homicide due to such pure evil, only one prosecutor has ever been jailed—for nine days. It seems emblematic of the problem that the DOJ office tasked with investigating prosecutorial misconduct is led by a former prosecutor who himself was ruled to have given “regrettable” instructions to his subordinates that resulted in prison for an innocent man. The police, for their part, will arrest you for eating SpaghettiOs. Or a donut, or a sandwich. They will arrest you for driving while sober, for being above the legal alcohol limit inside your home, and for neither driving nor being drunk. They will arrest you if there are drugs on the street nearby, and if there are no drugs at all. They will arrest you just for taking pictures of the police, and for taking pictures of anti-police protesters. They will arrest you if you’re a good Samaritan, and even if you are a victim. They will arrest you if they crash into your car, and if they crash into your bar. They will arrest you just for existing, having nothing to do with what the color of your skin is. They will arrest your grandmother for playing poker and your six-year-old for picking a flower, and if they do harm to themselves or each other, they will arrest you for that too. Despite how frequently law enforcement officials are involved in egregious abuse, we would all like to think that most would never cross the line—but is it reasonable to believe that any of them would turn a blind eye to someone who illegally has both drugs and a gun? Gun laws are actually enforced with particular zeal, and overwhelmingly against minorities, as best described in a Supreme Court brief filed by an alliance of legal aid and public defender groups led by Black Attorneys of Legal Aid: ​ ​Virtually all our clients whom New York prosecutes for exercising their Second Amendment right are Black or Hispanic. And that is no accident. New York enacted its firearm licensing requirements to criminalize gun ownership by racial and ethnic minorities. That remains the effect of its enforcement by police and prosecutors today (p. 5) ​ When someone in New York City is prosecuted for exercising their right to keep and bear arms—either at home or outside—they are almost always charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, a ‘violent felony’ punishable by 3.5 to 15 years in prison (pp. 6-7). ​ [T]he Penal Law considers a firearm ‘loaded’ if a person possesses it ‘at the same time’ they possess ammunition, regardless of whether the firearm is, in fact, loaded. As a result, New York prosecutors rarely charge firearm-possession cases as a lower-level offense alleging an ‘unloaded’ firearm. Second, the Penal Law dictates that unlicensed ‘possession’ of a firearm is, on its own, ‘presumptive evidence of intent to use the same unlawfully against another.’ As a result, unlicensed possession, on its own, is legally sufficient evidence to establish the heightened violent felony of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. Together, these two provisions allow New York prosecutors to charge almost every firearm possession case as the violent felony of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon (pp. 7-8).​ After relating blood-boiling examples of this cruel and indiscriminate enforcement on pp. 17-31, the brief concludes, ​ ​[W]e are mindful that the right to keep and bear arms has ‘controversial public safety implications’…But what these stories and our experience illustrate is that New York’s licensing requirements—which cause criminal penalties for unlicensed possession—themselves have controversial public safety implications. It is not safe to be approached by police on suspicion that you possess a gun without a license. It is not safe to have a search warrant executed on your home. It is not safe to be caged pretrial at Rikers Island. It is not safe to lose your job. It is not safe to lose your children. It is not safe to be sentenced to prison (pp. 31-33). Should there be any doubt about the political ideology of public defenders, they are a liberal subset of a liberal demographic. That brief focuses on New York, but even relatively gun-friendly Pennsylvania will convict someone for possessing a gun inside a house they owned but weren’t technically living in, and a veteran can be arrested in very gun-friendly Georgia for possessing the gun of the attacker he disarmed because he was “the last one to touch the gun.” The federal government, most relevantly to the law in question, goes to similar extremes. 18 US Code §922(q)(2) prohibits possession within a designated school zone, but it contains exceptions for those who are on non-school private property and those with a state-issued carry license. This has not stopped the government from prosecuting someone because her home was technically on public property, or because the state’s license qualifications didn’t meet imaginary unwritten standards. The threat facing cannabis patients who wish to exercise their full Constitutional rights is, at a bare minimum, more than realistic enough to unjustly deter them from doing so—but with Blacks 3.7 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than Whites despite similar rates of use, is there any question who will most often be arrested, jailed, prosecuted, and/or imprisoned for illegally possessing a firearm as well?

The answer is relative, not readily knowable, and irrelevant. The mere existence of a senseless and immoral law is an inherent evil—not just because it deters good people from conduct they should be free to engage in without fear of arrest, but because it symbolizes the population’s acceptance of the government granting itself the ability to issue such arbitrary decrees. That being said, an arrest is by itself extremely degrading and disruptive, generally becomes part of one’s publicly searchable criminal record, and can result in jail time even if the charges are eventually dropped—depending on one’s personal and employment circumstances, it can be life-ruining. Roughly 600 people a year are eventually convicted of firearm possession while being an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance, with countless more “only” arrested and/or prosecuted. While there doesn’t appear to be any statistical breakdown of how many such arrests involve medicinal cannabis, we do know that more than four million people were arrested for marijuana possession alone from 2012-2022. At the very least, the mere threat of arrest for victimless activity instills in the community distrust of law enforcement and disrespect for the law itself, fueling actual crime that harms actual victims. It’s safe to assume that people with no criminal record aren’t routinely receiving the maximum sentence, but is one minute in prison not far too much punishment for someone who has literally done nothing wrong?

By asserting a seemingly unlimited license to designate anyone “unvirtuous” or “dangerous” and revoke their constitutional rights on that basis. When then-Florida Commissioner of Agriculture (and current state Democratic Party chair) Nikki Fried sued the Justice Department over this very issue, it countered that in the past, “the government could disarm ‘unvirtuous citizens’” and that “one implication of this emphasis on the virtuous citizen is that the right to arms does not preclude laws disarming…criminals.” The government then similarly argued that “a historical tradition exists of regulations that restrict or prohibit firearms possession by those whose possession of firearms the government deems dangerous” (p. 23). To support this latter justification for disarming people who used a medicinal plant several months ago, the government points to the past disarmament of similarly “dangerous” Catholics, "Indians," and panhandlers (pp. 24-25)—and if the past stripping of rights based on religion, race, and wealth justifies the present stripping of rights based on plant ingestion, it logically follows that the government would also find those past criteria just as valid today (Native Americans were not originally among “the People” protected by the Bill of Rights, but they continued to be the focus of arms restrictions into the 1900s despite starting to integrate as early as 1789). If “dangerousness” doesn’t need to be based on actual dangerous behavior, then exactly whose rights can’t the government cancel whenever it wants? While we don’t have a direct answer, we can infer it from the government’s position regarding its similarly claimed power to declare people “criminals” and thus “unvirtuous.” In a different case (US v. Harrison) where a marijuana user challenged §922(g)(3), the judge recounted his exchange with the federal prosecutor: ​ ​Imagine a world where [a state] could make mowing one’s lawn a felony so that it could then strip all its newly deemed ‘felons’ of their right to possess a firearm…Remarkably, when presented with this lawn-mowing hypothetical argument, and asked if such an approach would be consistent with the Second Amendment, the United States said ‘yes.’ So, in the federal government’s view, a state or the federal government could deem anything at all a felony and then strip those convicted of that felony—no matter how innocuous the conduct—of their fundamental right to possess a firearm. The government does also attempt to support the “dangerous” label by citing historical laws against firearm possession by actively intoxicated people, but this is irrelevant as to those who used marijuana even just the previous day. As for the risk of someone handling a firearm while high, the risk is clearly far greater that people will be intoxicated on the often violence-inducing alcohol that’s available everywhere in unlimited amounts. There is no way to physically prevent someone from getting drunk and committing deadly acts with a car or any type of weapon, so a unique “dangerousness” label for past or infrequent cannabis use is beyond laughable. As for the government’s concern that it’s inherently “unvirtuous” to defy even to defy even senseless or immoral laws, slavery was once legal while freeing slaves was a crime. Legality does not equal morality. In sum, the position of the federal government is that it retains a general power to revoke the constitutional rights of anyone at any time. That should probably be just a bit of a bigger story. The cases discussed above relate specifically to rights protected by the Second Amendment, but what limits the government from stopping there? As those who have explored the rest of this site know, the Second Amendment does not provide weaker protection than other rights-shielding amendments—so if the government believes its own arguments about the danger posed by cannabis patients, then why isn’t it keeping us all safe by stripping their First and Fourth Amendment rights as well? If people who used state-legal marijuana in the last year are so violence-prone that we have no choice but to remove their constitutionally protected means of self-defense, why not subject them to random searches that are guaranteed to eventually prevent some number of violent acts? Why not prevent these drug-crazed maniacs from assembling, to eliminate the chance they might conspire to commit mass terror? The reason is that the government as a whole still unofficially “feels” like the Second Amendment doesn’t “count as much” as the rest of the Bill of Rights, but a government of the future may decide it feels that way about other rights too. Perhaps one day the entire Constitution won’t “count as much” as the government’s urge to just do whatever it wants. This gets to the heart of why it’s so incredibly urgent to stamp out “collective right” once and for all.