Your Daily Newt: Death Penalty for Drug Dealers

Newt Gingrich tried marijuana in college and hated it so much he concluded anyone bringing it into the country should be executed.Mark Makela/ZumaPress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out. (Daily Newt is back from a brief sabbatical following Newt around South Carolina.)

Ross Douthat’s criticism notwithstanding, Newt Gingrich is very much a man of ideas—so many ideas, in fact, that he often ends up floating vastly contradictory proposals within a manner of just a few years. As Daily Newt explained previously, Newt Gingrich wrote a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1981 calling for marijuana to be legalized for medical purposes. “[L]icensed physicians are competent to employ marijuana,” he wrote at the time. Pragmatic!

Flash-forward to 1996, and Gingrich’s views had shifted to the right, and then kept going for a little while past that. Gingrich was the lead sponsor of the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act,” which, as its name suggests, would have made importation of even a small amount of marijuana punishable by life imprisonment (first offense) and death (second offense):

 

How much is “100 usual dosage amounts” of pot? About two ounces—more than the usual Friday afternoon with Snoop Dogg, but well beneath the load carried by the serious drug traffickers Gingrich’s law was purportedly targeting. Our friends at Weedguru inform us that an ounce “can last a month for some smokers, but if you smoke multiple times a day it will vary from 1 week to 4 weeks.” The law would be just as likely to target college kids coming back from a long night in Tijuana as it would members of an international drug cartel.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate