Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Hitchcock, Timothy Leary, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco, 1965.
Declaration of Independence for Dr. Timothy Leary
ALLEN GINSBERG
Allen Ginsberg was a chief proponent of Leary’s transacademic uses of psychedelic substances, and was a longtime friend. This piece was originally dictated in July 1971 to Michael Horowitz. It was circulated as a petition after Leary had escaped prison and fled to Europe. Then President Richard Nixon, who had called Leary “the most dangerous man in the world,” sent Attorney General John Mitchell to argue for his return. Ginsberg sent this document. The Swiss granted Leary a short-lived asylum that was abnegated when the United States drummed up more charges, accusing Leary of being the “godfather of the largest drug smuggling ring in the world”—the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The Swiss gave in to U.S. demands. Leary fled. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Hitchcock, Timothy Leary, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco, 1965.
Declaration of Independence for Dr. Timothy Leary
July 4, 1971
MODEL STATEMENT IN DEFENSE OF THE PHILOSOPHER’S PERSONAL FREEDOM
PROPOSED BY SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA PROSE POETS’ PHALANX
ALLEN GINSBERG
From San Francisco Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx: to whomever concerned with liberty of expression in letters and speech, concerning immediate action to relieve the burden of imprisonment from the shoulders of Dr. Timothy Leary, who because of his philosophy, science and art practiced in the form of letters and speech has long suffered persecution, arrest, denunciation, numerous and prolonged jailings, bail denial, flight, and exile from the United States.
At time of writing, this Doctor of Philosophy without country, arrested in Switzerland, is held without charges awaiting extradition by California for that State’s Department of Correction. This aggressive prolongation of the boring scandal of Dr. Leary’s persecution by state bureaucracies, and present denial of his personal freedom by the Swiss state, is an unnecessary injustice resolvable as follows:
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx petitions the Swiss government, in faithfulness to the best of Western free-thinking tradition, to grant Dr. Leary status as permanent respected exile. We recommend that International P.E.N. Club request its Swiss chapter to intervene directly to Swiss authorities and propose the following information on behalf of Dr. Leary’s request for freedom and privacy as a literary refugee persecuted by Government for his thoughts and writings:
“Deal for Real,” in EAST VILLAGE OTHER (New York), Vol. 4, No. 3, Sept. 24, 1969; and LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS;
“Episode & Postscript,” in PLAYBOY, Vol. 16, No. 12, Dec. 1969;
was “an insidious and detrimental influence on society . . . a pleasure-seeking, irresponsible Madison Avenue advocate of the free use of LSD and marijuana.”1 The Judge McMillan who pronounced these words held above his bench a copy of PLAYBOY in justification for his language denying bail and sentencing Dr. Leary to the second 10-year imprisonment from which the author of:
JAIL NOTES, N.Y.: Douglas Book Corp. 1970
surprisingly escaped on September 12, 1970, and took troubled refuge abroad.
Whatever one’s opinions, or natural or national preferences amongst intoxicants, Letters, religions, and political or oecological theory, the Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx hereby affirms that Dr. Leary must certainly have the right to publish his own theories; that at stake in this case, once and for all, is Dr. Leary’s freedom to manifest his thoughts in the form of poems, psychological commentaries, dialogues, and essays of literary nature before a public whose younger generations, by themselves credibly experienced with the machines, politics and drugs that are the subject of Dr. Leary’s writings, include a large minority (perhaps a majority in his native land) who wish Dr. Leary well, and pray for his security, peace and protection from persecution by Government Police Bureaucracies everywhere.
It is in fact remarkable to note that Dr. Leary is, for a modern intellectual, a solitary splendid example of a Man Without a Country. Refused entry by most governments, he cannot visit other countries lest he be extradited to face the cruel and unusual punishment of now more than 20 years’ jail if forcibly carried back to America’s shores. Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx takes note that this proposed imprisonment of Dr. Leary rises merely from differences of opinion on public philosophy involving drug use, a scientific matter now being debated in professional circles (Psychology, Art, Religion, Poetry, Neuro-chemistry).
We take note that a previous domestic appeal against American persecution of Dr. Timothy Leary issued early in the history of this government’s war on him was published on May 10, 1966, and signed by: Howard S. Becker, Ph.D., Arnold Beichman, Eric Bentley, George Bowering, Joe Brainard, Harvey Brown, Robert Creeley, Robert S. de Ropp, Ph.D., Diane di Prima, Jason Epstein, Jules Feiffer, Leslie Feidler, Peter Fonda, Joel Fort, M.D., Jack Gelber, Nat Hentoff, Laura Huxley, Kenneth Koch, Stephen Koch, Irving Kristol, Lawrence Lipton, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Jonas Mekas, Anais Nin, Charles Olson, Norman Podhoretz, Ned Polsky, Ad Reinhart, Rabbi Zalman Schachter, Richard Seaver, Robert Silvers, Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, Alan Watts, D.D., Philip Whalen, and many others. The statement of that date stated:
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx also takes note of the fact that the very police bureaucracy in the U.S. that has hounded Dr. Leary for his professional opinions is the same Narcotics Bureau that in its historic “war on physicians”2 including suppression of documents and prohibition of medical research, has helped create a major “national plague” of heroin addiction. Personnel of these Narcotics Bureaus are themselves involved in narcotics traffic.
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx also takes note of recent accusations implicating the U.S. C.I.A. and other military and intelligence organizations in an historic role of subsidizing major traffickers in Indo-Chinese opium (namely, Gen. Ouane Rathikoune of Laos, Marshal Ky of South Vietnam, KMT armies presently in northern Thailand).
Given vast confusions of modern technology and now the much-publicized credibility gap between American government and public, as well as previously much-publicized difficulties of generation gap, the request of California (U.S.) Dept. of Correction through the American State Dept. to the Swiss Government for Criminal extradition of Dr. Leary from the mandarin anonymity of his short life of letters in Switzerland, seems to the under-signed poets, essayists and novelists an unseemly and intolerable continuing and exasperating literary vendetta against a specific gifted individual. Dr. Leary is certainly a “High Priest” within his area of specialized scholarship as against the questionable authority of any state in this scientific controversy.
The case of Dr. Leary is outright a case of persecution of ideas and texts—the persecution of his philosophy. Though arrested for grass, he was sentenced for Philosophy. Jailed for grass, he was long prisoned for Opinion. Denied bail for grass possession, he was detained behind barbed wire for Ideological Heresy.
Bay Area Poets’ Phalanx hereby petitions U.S. officials concerned to re-think hostile attitudes and adopt behavior more tolerant of natural controversy and common opinion: to recognize that in exercise of arbitrary authority over Dr. Leary they are engaging in unfortunate “State Policy.”
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx takes note of the public viability of the formulation proposed by the late poet Charles Olson, friend of Dr. Leary, that now “Private is public, and public is how we behave.” We affirm that Dr. Leary has the literary right to make his private opinions known publicly, and to engage unpunished in public literary activity. Poet Olson, 1961 Cambridge, addressing Professor Leary: “When the police come after you, you can stay in my house.”
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx specifically requests the American State Dept. to waste no more time, money or passion in this case, and to take no further steps to make a physical prize of Dr. Leary’s person. No move is a good move for the American Government in this case. We hereby request the Swiss Government to accept Dr. Leary as an archetype of the traditional political, cultural, literary, or philosophic refugee and grant him personal asylum.
As fellow writers, we recommend that Dr. Leary be considered, by all countries, advanced or underdeveloped on both sides of the so-called Cold War, a distinguished refugee from persecution by an International Police Bureaucracy whose executive and philosophic center in this case is a long-corrupted American Narcotics Bureau and its propaganda lobby, the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association (INEOA, Albany, N.Y., Honorary President Harry Anslinger, former chief of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau).
Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx takes note that the above bureaucracy has arrested and persecuted artist-persons and “underground” newspapers in many countries on pretexts of possession of small amounts of hemp grass for motives ranging from political hostility to culture shock; and has attempted to frame a number of celebrated writers, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, some defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and black and white political intellectuals, such as the presently-jailed Martin Sostre and John Sinclair, on charges similar to those used to entrap Dr. Timothy Leary for almost a decade now in a web of legal complications, a threatening bureaucratic maya created for him by financially-compromised officious members of as anti-intellectual, criminally-associated and professionally-corrupt a bureaucracy as U.S. Narcotics Bureaus—federal, state and local—have proved in recent history.
Finally, the undersigned take note of Dr. Leary’s influence on “students and others of immature judgment or tender years” for which he “is regarded as a menace to the community so long as he is at large,” in the eyes of his government prosecutors by their own word. We take note of Dr. Leary’s public essays in opposition to the American government’s war in Vietnam, and his dialogues such as that published widely with Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers touching the same subject. We understand that Dr. Leary’s request for Swiss asylum will be based upon his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and that in context of this disastrous war’s crises his plea is a legitimate statement of his situation.
In sum, Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx and associate friends urge the Swiss Government to release Dr. Timothy Leary from provisional extraditional arrest, not cooperate in extraditing Dr. Leary to America. We recommend to Swiss and all other governments that they grant our fellow Author Philosopher safe political asylum to complete his work—exploration of his consciousness, vocal literary expression of that unique individual Person whose presence is held sacred in all humane and gnostic democratic nations, and ever enshrined in their literary monuments, witness Whitman and Thoreau for America,
as well as the undersigned
Poets, Essayists, and Novelists
Ken Kesey | Ted Berrigan |
Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Margo Patterson Doss |
Michael McClure | John Doss, M.D. |
Robert Creeley | Lewis MacAdams |
Allen Ginsberg | Gavin Arthur |
Howard Becker | Paul Krassner |
Lenore Kandel | Michael Aldrich |
Anais Nin | Jan Herman |
Alan Watts | Andrew Hoyem |
Kenneth Rexroth | Philip Whalen |
Diane di Prima | Herbert Gold |
Philip Lamantia | Laura Huxley |
Don Allen | Tom Clark |
Bill Berkson | John Thorpe |
Tom Veitch | Lewis Warsh |