​Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is already known as a supporter of cannabis legalization, and has said he smoked pot during his youth. “I never exhaled,” he joked recently. But now Johnson has admitted publicly for the first time that he smoked marijuana more recently — from 2005 to 2008 — for medicinal purposes.

The Weekly Standard. “But for luck, I guess, I wasn’t arrested,” said Johnson, who was Governor of New Mexico from 1994 to 2002. “It’s not anything I volunteer, but you’re the only person that actually asked about it,” Johnson told reporter John McCormack of. “But for luck, I guess, I wasn’t arrested,” said Johnson, who was Governor of New Mexico from 1994 to 2002.

Although marijuana was illegal for medical or any other purposes in New Mexico until 2007, Johnson said he needed cannabis after a 2005 paragliding accident in Hawaii. His sails got snared in a tree, and Johnson fell about 50 feet to the ground, he said, suffering multiple bone fractures.

“In my human experience, it’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt,” Johnson said.

“Rather than using painkillers, which I have used on occasion before, I did smoke pot,” Johnson said, “as a result of having broken my back, blowing out both of my knees, breaking ribs, really taking about three years to recover.”

Johnson explained that pharmaceutical painkillers had once caused him to suffer “nasty side effecgts” and the pain of withdrawing from the pills was unbearable.