State trial courts in Michigan can no longer cite federal law to ban marijuana use as a condition of probation, under a unanimous opinion released by the Michigan Supreme Court on Monday, July 6.
In People v. Hess, the court’s seven justices found that lower courts erroneously cited federal marijuana laws when deciding whether it was legal to ban marijuana use while on probation. Recreational marijuana has been legal in Michigan for those 21 and older since 2018. The state also allows medical marijuana for qualifying patients.
In a unanimous opinion for the court, Justice Elizabeth Welch cited the 2014 case Ter Beek v. City of Wyoming, when the high court ruled the state’s medical marijuana laws at the time preempted a federal ban on marijuana use. (In that case Wyoming, a suburb of Grand Rapids, had argued John Ter Beek, a resident, shouldn’t have been able to grow marijuana plants for medical use on his property in the city because federal law banned marijuana use. When the case made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, justices ruled the state’s medical marijuana law preempted the federal Controlled Substances Act, and the city could not cite it as a reason to ban Ter Beek from growing the plants.)
