Cite as: 518 U. S. 267 (1996)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
the pertinent points—and concludes that § 881(a)(7) is remedial rather than punitive in character. Every reason Austin gave for treating § 881(a)(7) as punitive—the Court rejects or ignores. Every reason the Court provides for treating § 881(a)(7) as remedial—Austin rebuffed. The Court claims that its conclusion is consistent with decisions reviewing statutes "indistinguishable" "in most significant respects" from § 881(a)(7), ante, at 290, but ignores the fact that Austin reached the opposite conclusion as to the identical statute under review here.
First, the Court supposes that forfeiture of respondent's house is remedial in nature because it was an instrumentality of a drug crime. It is perfectly conceivable that certain kinds of instruments used in the commission of crimes could be forfeited for remedial purposes. Items whose principal use is illegal—for example, the distillery in Various Items— might be thus forfeitable. But it is difficult to understand how a house in which marijuana was found helped to substantially "facilitate" a narcotics offense, or how forfeiture of that house will meaningfully thwart the drug trade. In Austin, we rejected the argument that a mobile home and body shop were "instruments" of drug trafficking simply because marijuana was sold out of them. I see no basis for a distinction here.10
Second, the Court claims that the statute serves the purpose of deterrence, which helps to show that it is remedial rather than punitive in character. Ante, at 292. That statement cannot be squared with our precedents. Halper ex-10 The Court also speculates that nuisance abatement may provide a remedial interest. Ante, at 290-291. The abatement theory was questionable enough in Bennis v. Michigan, 516 U. S. 442 (1996), where under the State's theory the same acts might or might not turn an ordinary automobile into a nuisance, depending on the neighborhood in which the car happened to be parked. See id., at 464, n. 9 (Stevens, J., dissenting). Here, there is no argument that Ursery's home constituted some kind of a nuisance.
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