Federal Court Rules Medical Cannabis Users Have No Right to Defend Themselves

In addition to the massive increase in government violence, another side-effect of the war on drugs is the stripping of so-called rights. Under United States law, a person in possession of verboten substances cannot legally exercise their Second Amendment privilege. Some people have asked whether or not cannabis users who have been given permission to treat their medical condition by the State are an exception to that rule. A federal court recently ruled that they’re not:

A federal ban on the sale of guns to medical marijuana card holders does not violate the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals applies to the nine Western states that fall under the court’s jurisdiction, including California, Washington and Oregon.

It came in a lawsuit filed by S. Rowan Wilson, a Nevada woman who said she tried to buy a firearm for self-defense in 2011 after obtaining a medical marijuana card. The gun store refused, citing the federal rule banning the sale of firearms to illegal drug users.

This ruling is ridiculous for two reasons.

First, this ruling is really stating is that people suffering from certain medical conditions have no right to self-defense. If, for example, you suffer from chronic pain and have only had success treating it with cannabis the State has declared your life so lacking in value that it’s not even worth protecting.

Second, this ruling also declares that your gun ownership privileges can be revoked without due process:

Wilson said she was not a marijuana user, but obtained the card in part as an expression of support for marijuana legalization.

[…]

The 9th Circuit in its 3-0 decision said it was reasonable for federal regulators to assume a medical marijuana card holder was more likely to use the drug.

According to the federal court it’s reasonable for federal regulators to assume holders of medical cannabis cards are using cannabis. The key point here is the word assume. Federal regulators don’t have to actually prove that you’ve broken federal prohibition laws to strip you of your gun ownership privileges. It merely has to assume you’ve broken the prohibition. Gun rights activists should be flipping their shit about this because it’s the exact same logic used by people demanding that anybody on the terrorist watch lists be prohibited from owning firearms. No due process is necessary for the State to declare your gun ownership privileges null and void.

Robert Anton Wilson founded the Guns and Dope Party under the premise that if you could get all of the gun nuts and all of the drop smokers united together you’d have a majority of voters. The downside is that the gun nuts tend to not like the dope smokers and vice versa. But the two groups really should be united because they’re fighting the same battle, which is the battle over who owns you. Both the gun nuts and the dope smokers are, whether they know it or not, arguing for self-ownership. The right of self-ownership necessarily requires the right to defend yourself, which the gun nuts are fighting for, and the right to put whatever you please into your body, which the dope smokers are fighting for. If these two groups would unite to tell all of the prohibitionists to go fuck themselves we might see some positive change in this forsaken police state of a nation.