Albuquerque Dispatch

TOKIN' REFORMER

New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson was giving a luncheon speech to a group of
Rotarians. It was your typical political event--faded club flags, raffle
announcements, balding white men in bad suits. Then Johnson started talking
about drugs. "My support of drug legalization comes, in part, from the fact
that I smoked marijuana in college and the fact that I never viewed it as
being criminal," he declared. "What's the actual health impact of doing
heroin? From what I understand, there's none."

A swift silence stilled the 100-plus people in the crowd. They had heard
about this. Last summer, Johnson became the nation's highest elected
official to advocate legalizing heroin and marijuana. Since then, he has
warned students, "Watch out for the drunk boy at the party. But the one
who's smoked marijuana just wants to put on the headsets and attack a bag
of potato chips"--causing parents at a junior high school to seek a court
injunction preventing the governor from speaking to their kids. At a Santa
Fe junior high school, Johnson had told youngsters, "[T]he fact is that, in
this room right here, a lot of you are going to do illegal drugs."

And now worried Rotarians were watching their luncheon turn into a
Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I thought the crowd would start to boo. But it
didn't. In fact, a few people broke into mischievous grins. Then guffaws
came from the back of the room. Johnson was great entertainment--and that,
it seems, is all New Mexico's voters want from their governor, no matter
what kind of havoc he wreaks on their state.

When he first ran for governor in 1994, Johnson presented himself as a
turquoise "Mr. Smith": a self-made millionaire who had never before held
office challenging a three-time incumbent. He ran as a Republican but
campaigned as the anti-politician, promising not to let the demands of the
office deter him from participating in Iron Man Triathlons.

During his first term, Johnson governed precisely as promised: no problem
was so complex that it didn't have a simple solution. Vouchers would
correct the education crisis. Private prisons lightened the checkbook.
Legalized gambling solved American Indians' woes. Johnson also showed no
patience for the give-and-take of legislative negotiation, which meant that
his squawking produced little in the way of law. All of Johnson's major
initiatives either failed in the legislature or blew up after
implementation; he vetoed more bills than any governor in state history.
Yet this hardly dampened his reelection prospects. Quite the contrary:
Johnson's goofy demeanor inoculated him from public backlash, and in 1998
he bested a well-financed challenger by one of the widest margins in state
history.

Then came drugs. Northern New Mexico has one of the highest rates of death
from drug overdoses in the nation; the state as a whole suffers from a near
plague of addictions. Johnson proposed to solve this by legalizing not only
marijuana--which would be sold by private license, just like alcohol--but
also heroin, which pharmacies would distribute to medically certified
addicts. The benefits, Johnson argues, would be fewer overdoses, lower
costs, and fewer crimes committed to support habits. "How many people died
from the health consequences of doing alcohol?" Johnson quizzed the
Rotarians. "One hundred fifty thousand. How many died from tobacco? Four
hundred fifty thousand. From legal prescription drugs? One hundred
thousand. How many died last year from cocaine and heroin? About three
thousand. And no reported deaths from marijuana."

If that sounds like flimsy evidence, the rest of Johnson's argument isn't
much sturdier. Mainly, he cites the Netherlands, where similar steps have
been taken with favorable results--though most experts agree it's
impossible to extrapolate that the same would happen here. But Johnson has
no patience for such complications. "I've seen governors come and go," says
Republican State Senator Billy McKibben, "and this one's attention span can
be measured in nanoseconds."

This combination of naivete and impatience, though, is precisely what
endears Johnson to voters. Outside his office one recent evening I
encountered a Republican county chairman, a Hispanic couple from near the
Mexican border, a woman who lost her daughter to a drunk driver, and some
people who make pro-marijuana Christmas cards (featuring pictures of hemp
plants festooned with ornaments). This group had strikingly little in
common politically. Save for the card makers, all found Johnson's
drug-legalization policy absurd. Yet all agreed he was a great guy and
pledged to vote for him whenever they could. "I've got a brother who died
on the drugs, so, no, I don't think people should be able to have them,"
explained Hector Ybarra, one of the visitors. "But the governor, he's a
really good man.... I voted for him because he seems like he'd be a friend.
And this drug thing, you know, that's just his thing."

Of course, not everybody in New Mexico can afford to take the governor's
actions so lightly. "The kids at school say the governor says it's OK to
smoke pot and take the heroin," says Joe Mascarenas, an undersheriff in
northern New Mexico. "I think this governor's opinions are going to kill
more people." And it's not just drugs: Johnson's other vaunted solutions
don't seem to be doing much good, either. The expansion of private prisons
not only has yet to show substantial savings, it's contributed to more
riots. The schools are still a mess--one organization recently ranked New
Mexico the worst state in the nation in which to raise a child--yet
Johnson's refusal to "back off" on vouchers has frozen the debate over
education reform. And Indian-run gambling has been a legal morass ever
since the state Supreme Court ruled Johnson's unilateral compacts illegal.
Johnson always pledged to remain true to himself. Elective office, he
proclaimed, would not change him one bit. Unfortunately for New Mexico, he
has been true to his word.