"We need to legalize marijuana," New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson said yesterday, and the crowd cheered wildly.

The crowd, it should be noted, was gathered at the annual conference of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. 

Johnson had bravely gone where no governor had gone before -- to a convention of America's foremost pro-pot organization, where the T-shirts showed the Cat in the Hat toking from a water pipe and the bumper stickers read "Pee for Enjoyment, Not Employment."

"I don't recall that we've ever had any high elected officials speak to our conferences," said NORML Executive Director Keith Stroup.

That's right: Stroup really said "high elected officials."

Johnson wasn't high, of course. The conservative Republican governor stopped smoking dope and snorting cocaine decades ago and he hasn't had a sip of booze in 13 years. These days, he gets high by running marathons and climbing mountains and hang gliding. 

But now, while C-SPAN cameras churned, Johnson stood smiling in a place most pols would flee in terror -- at a podium in front of a NORML banner that read, "Stop Arresting Responsible Marijuana Smokers." 

"Most users of marijuana are responsible users," he said. "They're not doing any harm to anybody. . . . Having smoked it and given it up, I would ask you not to smoke pot. But should it be a criminal offense? No."

Johnson, 48, has declared war on the war on drugs. "The war on drugs," he says, "is a miserable failure." He advocates that we treat marijuana like alcohol. As for stronger drugs: "We ought to adopt a harm-reduction strategy, basically moving away from a criminal model to a medical model."

Not only does Johnson dissent from the drug war, he also dares to speak honestly about his own drug use. Unlike pols who will sheepishly admit to having "experimented" with drugs in their youth, Johnson says he smoked a ton of pot and it was "kind of fun." That bit of heresy in 1999 infuriated Barry McCaffrey, then the federal drug czar, who denounced the governor as "Puff Daddy Johnson," a man pushing a "pro-drug message."

Reminded of that incident, Johnson just shrugs and smiles. He's got a boyish grin, bright blue eyes and short brown hair that looks perpetually tousled. When it comes to warning kids off drugs, he says, honesty might work better than hysteria. In high school, he says, he was taught that marijuana would make him crazy. Then he tried it.

"The thing that struck me was that this whole scare story was a lie," he says. "I had been brought up believing lies. It was like when I found out that Santa Claus didn't exist. My God, that meant that the tooth fairy didn't exist! And neither did the Easter Bunny!" He laughs. "This was kind of the same thing. I thought, 'Gee, this is all a lie!' "

As a student at the University of New Mexico in the early '70s, he says, he smoked pot maybe two or three times a week. He liked it. He tried cocaine a few times, and he liked that a bit too much.

"I understood why people get hooked on that stuff," he says. "I get in trouble for saying what I'm about to say, but, well, it was great! It was an unbelievable high! I understood why this was not anything I wanted to get involved with because -- wow!"

Now, as a straight and sober adult, Johnson figures his dope use was foolish. "It's diminishing returns -- the more you use it, the less you get out of it," he says. "It was nice, but if you do it all the time, you end up in a stupor. It's a waste of time."

After college, Johnson started a handyman business with Dee Simms, the woman who is now his wife and the mother of their two college-age children. In 20 years, they'd expanded their operation into a multimillion-dollar construction company with 1,000 employees. In his spare time, Johnson climbed mountains and jumped out of airplanes. 

"My mother always celebrated every year that I wasn't a widow because the man is such a lunatic," says Dee Simms Johnson, smiling. "If I worried about him, I'd be a basket case."

One day in 1993, Johnson came home and told his skeptical spouse about his latest harebrained scheme.

"He just walked in and said, 'I'm going to run for governor,' " she recalls. "I said, 'No, you're not.' He said, 'Yes, I am.' " 

And he did. He'd never been involved in politics but he went to the local Republican bosses and announced that he was running. They said he had no chance. He ran anyway, spending $500,000 of his own money and campaigning as a conservative outsider who would run the government like a business. He won.

In office, he has cut taxes, reduced the state workforce, built two new prisons, raised teacher salaries and crusaded, unsuccessfully, for school vouchers. But he is well known for his vetoes. In seven years he has vetoed more than 700 bills passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature. 

"He regards the legislature as his enemy -- even members of his own party," says Republican state Rep. Ron Godbey.

"I may have vetoed more bills than any governor ever," Johnson says proudly. "I'm one of those citizens who think we have enough laws. A law is an infringement on somebody's freedom." 

Johnson did not reveal his heretical views on the drug war until after he was reelected to his second -- and, by law, final -- term in 1998. With no political plans, he felt free to raise the issue.

"Half the budget for law enforcement, half the budget for courts, half the budget for prison is drug-related," he says. "Is there a bigger issue?"

His talk about legalizing drugs won him a lot of national media attention and drew some pointed attacks. Godbey calls him "ill-informed and ignorant of history." McCaffrey said Johnson's proposals "would put more drugs in the hands of our children." 

The public response has been more positive, Johnson says. Letters, phone calls and e-mails are running 20 to 1 in his favor, he claims. "A lot of politicians tell me that they believe in what I'm doing but they could never do it themselves," he says. "But I'm keeping those conversations locked tight. I'm not going to tell on anybody."

Not surprisingly, the NORML crowd gave him a standing ovation. "He has become our most effective advocate," says Stroup.

In the question period after his speech, an editor of High Times, the pot magazine, asked the governor about his experiences smoking dope. 

"I've never hidden the fact that like 80 million Americans, I have smoked pot," Johnson said. "In retrospect, I think I probably wasted some time. But that's in retrospect -- I didn't think so at the time."

That got a laugh. Then a woman asked if he thought pot smokers needed to be put into drug treatment programs. 

"Clearly, I did not need treatment," Johnson said. Then he smiled. "Of course, there would be many people who think that I do."