Allen Ginsberg & LeMar — 1964

Last verified: April 2026

The Beats Arrive

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and the East Village / Greenwich Village circle treated cannabis (and a lot more) as raw material for literature. The Beat era of the 1950s moved fluidly between Greenwich Village basement jazz clubs and Lower East Side tenements where cannabis was, openly, a sacrament. Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) made the New York-and-cross-country Beat scene a cultural touchstone.

Ginsberg in the Village

Ginsberg lived for decades on East 12th Street; the apartment was a fixture of NORML organizing in the 1970s and a continuous gathering point for poets, activists, and counterculture figures from the 1960s through his death in 1997. The Lower East Side and East Village backdrop — tenements, basements, jazz clubs, poetry readings — was not just where Ginsberg lived but where he organized.

LeMar — Legalize Marijuana

In 1964, Ginsberg co-founded LeMar (Legalize Marijuana) with poet Ed Sanders. LeMar was one of the very first organized cannabis-legalization actions in U.S. history — predating NORML by six years and most other organized cannabis-reform efforts by even longer.

LeMar’s most famous public action was a picket of the Women’s House of Detention on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village — a notorious women’s jail where many of those convicted of low-level drug offenses, including cannabis possession, served time. The picket explicitly named cannabis prohibition as a civil-rights and gender-justice issue, framing the criminal-law framework around drugs as inseparable from broader patterns of racial and gender enforcement.

Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders — poet, founder of the rock band the Fugs, and proprietor of the Peace Eye Bookstore on East 10th Street — was Ginsberg’s primary collaborator on LeMar. Sanders’s broader Lower East Side political organizing in the 1960s included Vietnam War opposition, Yippie organizing, and the broader counter-cultural infrastructure that supported the early cannabis-reform movement.

The Picket

The LeMar picket of the Women’s House of Detention drew small numbers by contemporary protest standards but was significant for several reasons:

• It was public — in 1964, public demonstrations explicitly demanding cannabis legalization were exceptionally rare
• It was geographically precise — targeting an actual jail where actual people were serving cannabis-related time, not abstract policy
• It established a civil-rights framing for cannabis reform that NORML would adopt and expand six years later
• It connected literary and activist communities in a coalition that would shape NYC cannabis politics for decades

The Women’s House of Detention

The Women’s House of Detention, demolished in 1973, stood at 10 Greenwich Avenue. The site is now a community garden — the Jefferson Market Garden — behind the Jefferson Market Library. The jail’s removal is part of the broader Greenwich Village landscape that includes Stonewall (a few blocks away) and the broader 1960s-1970s civil-rights infrastructure that shaped contemporary NYC.

Ginsberg’s Continuing NORML Work

Ginsberg remained active in cannabis-reform organizing through NORML’s founding in 1970 and beyond. His apartment on East 12th Street served as an organizing hub for NORML actions, NYC Cannabis Parade planning, and broader counter-cultural drug-policy work. The annual NYC Cannabis Parade & Rally (originated as a smoke-in May Day march in the 1970s) drew on the LeMar-and-NORML organizing tradition Ginsberg helped create.

The Beats and the Cultural Lineage

The Greenwich Village / East Village Beat-and-LeMar lineage runs through to contemporary NYC cannabis culture in several ways:

• The literary-activist coalition that LeMar embodied was reproduced in High Times Magazine’s 1974 founding from a West 11th Street apartment by Tom Forçade — a direct geographic and thematic continuity
• The civil-rights framing of cannabis reform that LeMar advanced was central to the MRTA’s 50% equity goal architecture
• The geographic concentration of cannabis-cultural sites in the Village (LeMar’s picket, Stonewall, the West 11th Street High Times offices, Ginsberg’s apartment) makes the neighborhood the densest cannabis-cultural-historical zone in the city

Stonewall and the Adjacent Civil-Rights History

Stonewall National Monument in Christopher Park (a few blocks from LeMar’s picket site) was designated by President Obama in 2016. The proximity of the LeMar picket and the Stonewall Inn — both in Greenwich Village — reflects the physical concentration of 1960s civil-rights organizing infrastructure in the neighborhood. The Stonewall NM is now federal land, which means cannabis on the monument grounds is federally illegal regardless of MRTA — an irony given the cannabis-cultural history of the surrounding blocks. See Federal Land Warning.