U.S. Supreme Court rules 6–3 in Gonzales v. Raich that Congress can ban home-grown medical cannabis under the Commerce Clause

On June 6, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark 6–3 decision in Gonzales v. Raich (545 U.S. 1), holding that the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to prohibit the local cultivation and possession of cannabis even when it is grown at home for personal medical use in full compliance with state law.

How the case reached the Supreme Court

In August 2002, deputies from the Butte County Sheriff’s Department and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrived at the California home of Diane Monson, a medical cannabis patient registered under California’s Proposition 215. Although local sheriff’s deputies concluded Monson’s six cannabis plants were completely legal under California law, federal DEA agents seized and destroyed them. Monson and fellow California patient Angel Raich sued the U.S. Attorney General, arguing that applying the federal Controlled Substances Act to non-commercial, wholly intrastate medical cultivation exceeded Congress’s authority to regulate “interstate commerce.”

What the Court ruled—and why state laws survived anyway

• The 6–3 majority (Justice John Paul Stevens): Relying on the New Deal-era precedent Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Court ruled that Congress could regulate purely local, non-commercial cannabis cultivation because home-grown cannabis, in the aggregate, could affect supply and demand in the broader interstate market.
• The dissents (Justices O’Connor, Rehnquist, and Thomas): Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dissented, warning that the ruling undermined the constitutional principle of states acting as “laboratories of democracy.”
• Why state legalization continued: Crucially, Gonzales v. Raich held only that federal agents could enforce federal law—it did not strike down California’s Proposition 215 or force state police to enforce federal prohibition. Because the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine bars the federal government from compelling states to criminalize conduct under state law, states remained free to repeal their own cannabis prohibitions—and in 2014 Congress enacted the Rohrabacher–Farr Amendment to bar the Justice Department from spending funds to raid state-compliant medical patients like Raich and Monson.