In United States v. Langley, --- F.4th ---, No. 20-50119 (9th Cir. 2021), the Court affirmed the district court’s denial of Richard Langley’s motion to amend the conditions of his supervised release to permit him to use medical marijuana as allowed by California state law.
The case is not really about marijuana, but instead the rules of prior binding authority.
Langley argued he has a fundamental constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to use medical marijuana. The Court disagreed, holding it was bound by Raich v. Gonzales, 500 F.3d 8850 (9th Cir. 2007), which rejected the identical substantive due process claim.
Langley argues that we are no longer bound by Raich’s conclusion. He points out that Raich acknowledged that widespread legal recognition of a practice can sometimes provide additional evidence that a right is fundamental, id. at 865–66 (discussing Lawrence v. Texas, 439 U.S. 558, 571–72 (2003)), and that 36 states and the District of Columbia no longer criminalize the use of marijuana for medical purposes. But this argument misunderstands our rule that “a published decision of this court constitutes binding authority which must be followed unless and until overruled by a body competent to do so,” Gonzalez v. Arizona, 677 F.3d 383, 389 n.4 (9th Cir. 2012) (cleaned up), aff’d sub nom. Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., 570 U.S. 1 (2013). Raich’s conclusion that medical marijuana use is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” 500 F.3d at 864, is binding on us until it is overturned by a higher authority. Even if state laws decriminalizing marijuana use could constitute additional evidence under the Glucksberg test, we are bound by our holding in Raich until such time as a higher authority determines that there is a fundamental right to medical marijuana use that we are “blind to” today, id. at 866. See Wilson v. Lynch, 835 F.3d 1083, 1098 n.9 (9th Cir. 2016) (holding that a substantive due process claim based on a fundamental right to use medical marijuana is “foreclosed by our decision in Raich”).
