Andrew Gillum arrested in Alabama on drug possession charges

Andrew Gillum was arrested in Daphne, Alabama, on July 2 after police said they stopped him for erratic driving and found drugs in his vehicle. He was released the next day, but the arrest added a new legal blow to a former Florida candidate whose public profile has already been marked by scandal and collapse.

The Daphne Police Department said officers made the stop around 10:45 p.m. on U.S. Highway 98 near North Main Street, in the Gulf Coast city just east of Mobile. Booking records listed charges of possession of dangerous drugs, possession of drug paraphernalia and second-degree possession of marijuana. Some reports said officers found three packages of a substance that later tested positive for methamphetamine, along with marijuana.

Gillum, 46, rose from Tallahassee city hall to the edge of national power. He served as mayor of Florida’s capital from 2014 through 2018, then became a national figure in the 2018 governor’s race, where he lost to Ron DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes, a margin of less than 1 percentage point. At the time, the defeat was widely seen as a defining moment in Florida politics and a sign of how close Gillum had come to becoming the state’s first Black governor.

This arrest lands after years of legal and political setbacks that already reshaped his standing. In 2019, the Florida Commission on Ethics found probable cause that Gillum had violated state ethics laws by accepting gifts during out-of-town trips with lobbyists and vendors and failing to report them. That case was later settled for $5,000.

His post-campaign troubles deepened in 2022, when he was indicted on 21 federal counts, including wire fraud-related charges and false statements. NBC News later reported that Gillum was acquitted of lying to the FBI. The Alabama arrest now pushes his name back into the news in a far more damaging context, with the new charges tied directly to a traffic stop, an alleged cache of drugs and a booking in Baldwin County.

Gillum was booked into the Baldwin County Corrections Center and released on July 3. Court records were not yet available, and no lawyer who could speak for him was immediately identified. He had not publicly addressed the arrest as the latest reports came in, leaving the next filings and any defense response to determine how much further the case will alter what remains of his political legacy.