But he's also kind of mellow. Like he's used to it all.

We're sitting in the green room at C-Span; Johnson's just finished taking an unreal number of supportive viewer calls on the morning chat show, "Washington Journal." But the conversation eventually turns to the victims of the shot-down missionary plane in Peru, which Johnson -- who has perhaps become the nation's leading critic of the drug war -- sees as just two more casualties in a senseless losing battle.

Veronica "Roni" Bowers and her 7-month-old baby daughter Charity died when their single-engine Cessna 185, owned by Baptists for World Evangelism, was shot down by the Peruvian air force because it was suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.

"It's happening every single day in the name of 'We don't want our kids to do drugs,'" Johnson says. Not that he thinks that the Bowers' deaths will be registered by the American public as two more notches in the belt of a failed war. "It's just today's page in the drug war," he says. "There was a page yesterday and the day before, and there's going to be a page tomorrow."

On Tuesday, Johnson returns to New Mexico after a six-day jaunt to the nation's capital, where he headlined the annual conference of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), accepted an award from AIDS Action on Monday, and racked up one media appearance after another -- MSNBC's "Hardball," CNN's "Crossfire" and NBC's "Meet the Press."

But it seems like Johnson is leaving Washington without the feeling that a whole lot has come of his trip, at least in terms of influencing politicians or the press. Congress is just as committed to pursuing "tough-on-crime" anti-drug measures, which Johnson thinks are futile and unrealistic.

"You saw in recent weeks [Congress] talking about ecstasy and making penalties tougher?" he asks me, incredulous. "You know, c'mon!" he shouts, exasperated. "C'mon!"

Johnson seems much younger than his 48 years, and he speaks with a distinct Sante Fe inflection, which ... can sound a little flaky, and makes it easy for the Washington establishment to dismiss him. The Washington Post relegated coverage of his NORML appearance to its Style section, where the writer made much of NORML executive director Keith Stroup's reference to Johnson as a "high elected official."

Get it? "High"? Get it?

Johnson rolls his eyes. He doesn't understand why the media doesn't report more critically about the approximately $50 billion a year spent on the War on Drugs (with roughly $10 billion in federal money devoted to combating marijuana use alone). In 1998, 600,938 Americans were arrested for simple possession of marijuana; an approximate 80 million Americans are said to have experimented with marijuana in their lifetimes, including Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, and -- who knows -- maybe even President George W. Bush, who refuses to answer the question.

Bush is a tricky spot for Johnson, and the president, whom Johnson calls a close "personal friend," threatens to erode some of Johnson's credibility on this issue. Bush's Department of Education is demanding that college students who take out student loans answer questions about their drug history -- questions that Bush won't answer.

But when I bring up Bush's evasiveness on the subject of his own drug history, Johnson quickly changes the subject to the guy who lost last November.

"I read accounts that Gore smoked marijuana all the time" when he was young, Johnson said. "He smoked marijuana like I smoked marijuana. And he's saying he smoked it 'a couple' times. They're both very evasive."

True enough, if irrelevant since Gore's not enforcing the nation's drug laws. But then there's Bush's nomination for drug czar, John Walters, whom even outgoing czar Barry McCaffrey has expressed concern about for emphasizing interdiction over education and treatment.

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