"No, no, I don't need it," Johnson said in a new BBC television documentary broadcast Tuesday.
But the fallen hero of the Canadian track world initially hesitated when asked what he would do if he had the choice again, suspicious of how his response would be taken.
"If I say yes or say no, then I get burned," he laughed before saying no when pressed for an answer.
The 50-minute documentary, part of a BBC series called Reputations, chronicles Johnson's life from his boyhood in Jamaica to his arrival in Toronto in 1976 at age 15.
Johnson remembers winning races in Jamaica for small bets of five or 10 cents and the bullying he faced in Toronto for his stammer until he outshone the bullies on the track.
Slapped with a lifetime ban from competition after a second positive drug test, Johnson said he is not the only track star to cheat.
But his fall from grace may have been greater than any other athlete when he was stripped of his gold medal and world record after testing positive for an anabolic steroid after winning the 100-metre race at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
"Everybody cheats, who doesn't cheat in life?" Johnson asked.
"Why Ben Johnson? I am not the only one in this world."
Some sympathy for Johnson's position is expressed in the documentary by his former coach, Charlie Francis, who said some triple-murderers haven't faced the sort of criticism Johnson has put up with.
Angella Issajenko, a sprinter whose career was caught in the drug scandal that erupted from Johnson's positive test, described him as the greatest sprinter the world has ever seen.
Like Francis she describes Johnson's treatment following the scandal as unfair.
"He didn't sodomize somebody's child, come on, he took...stanazolol a few days a week, big deal," she said.
"When he won everybody was like, 'Oh, great, wonderful.' When he lost he wasn't a Canadian anymore but he was a Jamaican-Canadian all of a sudden and 'how could he do this to us?'"
"He didn't do anything to you. Do you really think that athletes are out there running for their whole country?"
"They are running for themselves."
The program traces the start of Johnson's steroid use to the realization by Francis that he couldn't compete against East Germans without drugs and his defeat to legendary U.S. sprinter Carl Lewis at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
"It was clear that drugs could make the difference for him in the long run and we had that discussion, so it became a question of are you interested in making up the difference and winning these races?" said Francis.
Although the former coach left no doubt Johnson was willing to go along with the drugs from the outset, the sprinter disputes Francis' recollection, saying he didn't know what he was taking at the beginning.
The Johnson saga has haunted the Olympic movement since 1988. As he retired as president of the International Olympic Committee this month, Juan Antonio Samaranch used the Johnson case to make the point the drug fight will never be won in sport.
"There are only partial victories," Samaranch told the Spanish newspaper El Pais earlier this month.
"In doping, the war is never won. You can only win battles."
By Kevin Ward
