Gingrich Pounds On Drug Use Issue

AUGUSTA, Ga. (AllPolitics, July 23) -- Predicting drugs will be a major campaign issue, House Speaker Newt Gingrich continued to harp on what he calls the Clinton Administration's lax attitude toward past drug use among White House officials. (64K WAV sound)

Speaking at an Augusta fund-raiser for Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), Gingrich said White House spokesman Mike McCurry's comments last week -- he said, having grown up in the 1970's, he "of course" smoked "a joint from time to time" -- was tantamount to excusing drug use.

McCurry's comments came in the wake of reports of recent cocaine and crack cocaine use by 21 administration officials. He defended them, saying a special program set up by the White House and run by the Secret Service monitors the group to ensure everyone is clean.

Unimpressed, Gingrich declared: "I think they should dramatically, radically, today, change their position on drug use, adopt a tough position, and they should get rid of the people in the White House who have been doing drugs in the last couple of years."

What about his own acknowledged experimentation with marijuana as a graduate student? "It was the wrong thing to do, and I've absolutely said people shouldn't do it," Gingrich explained. "That's the difference. When I say it, I say people shouldn't do it. Period. When they say it, it's a joke, as though people ought to do it and it's OK, and it's fine."

But an earlier Gingrich statement about his own drug use, quoted in the Economist magazine last year, sounds rather, well, McCurry-like. "That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era," Gingrich told the magazine.

Gingrich told Norwood's supporters that anyone caught smuggling a commercial quantity of drugs across the border should, at minimum, be imprisoned for life, and that professional dealers should be executed.

Gingrich Pounds On Drug Use Issue

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