Former Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is in custody again just over a month after his initial arrest in July. Court documents show the judge in Gillam’s case ordered him taken to the Mobile County jail after he missed a drug screening. The former candidate also tested positive for methamphetamine in a drug court appearance.
The Daphne Police Department arrested Gillum back in July and charged him with drug possession, having drug paraphernalia, and second-degree possession of marijuana. Police reported that they stopped him when he was driving erratically near North Main Street. Police report Gillum had rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of methamphetamine.
APR reported back in July how, Gillum is a co-host of the politically themed Native Land Pod, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding News and Information Podcast in 2025. A message seeking comment was left for the podcast’s production company. In a news release, the Daphne Police Department said officers stopped Gillum’s vehicle around 10:45 p.m. and initiated a probable cause search after one of them noticed a glass pipe on the center console.
They found several rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine, police said. Gillum, who served as mayor of Florida’s capital from 2014 to 2018, came within less than a percentage point of being elected the state’s first Black governor, losing to DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes.
In 2020, Gillum was found in a Miami Beach hotel room with a man who had apparently overdosed on drugs. Police said Gillum himself was too inebriated to talk about what happened. The man survived and no one was ever charged with a crime for the overdose, but Gillum withdrew from public life for months afterward while seeking treatment for alcohol abuse and depression. Months later, he told a TV interviewer that he had to come to grips with what he had done.
“So much of my recovery has been about trying to get over shame,” Gillum said on the Tamron Hall talk show in September 2020.
In 2022, Gillum was indicted on federal conspiracy and wire fraud charges for allegedly funneling tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations through third parties back to himself for personal use.
A 2023 trial ended in a hung jury on those charges and an acquittal on charges that Gillum lied to undercover FBI agents posing as developers who paid for a 2016 trip he took with his brother to New York, including hotel rooms, meals, a boat tour and a ticket to the hit Broadway show “Hamilton.”
Gillum's next court appearance is August 13th.