After all, isn't that the lesson of Leary's wonder drug, LSD, and the hallucinogenic plants from which it sprang -- that it's no use sacrificing the present for some unrealizable future utopia or some depressive nostalgia for the past? But to most of the media, Leary's death is the excuse to turn "Be here now" into "Be here then," thus corrupting the initial liberating moment, turning it into some kind of style or marketing niche.

"Are the '60s finally over?" opens anchorwoman and NewsNight host Margie Reedy. This is my fourth time here. I don't know why they ask me back, since each time I've criticized the media -- and, by association, the host. But it must be "good TV"; the conflict makes the show. And the millions of us who learned, at a distance, how to prank the press by watching guys like Tim Leary do it, are, as a result, somewhat better armed in the 24-hour-a-day war between media and self. It's key to Leary's legacy -- almost apart from any psychedelic experience.

Reedy, reading from a teleprompter, tells the audience that Leary, who promoted LSD use while a Harvard professor in the early '60s, "threw a generation into a tailspin" during his "chaotic and drug-powered pinball trip through life," and she notes that "Leary didn't get his wish to commit cyber-cide on the Internet" (an idea Leary shelved weeks before his death). She says that the late president Richard Nixon once called Leary "the most dangerous man alive." (Leary responded by noting that such a comment from a psychopath like Nixon was "my Nobel Prize.")

Leary would love the fact that my retirement from journalism at 36 presented New England Cable News with a dilemma: how to categorize me. We settle on "cultural historian" (heh!), and Reedy seems ready to believe the hype.

"Al," she says, "since Leary was teaching at Harvard when he began all this experimentation, what was it like in the area then? Did people feel anything extraordinary was going on here?"

"I dunno, Margie," I reply, "since I was three years old in 1963, when he was garnering attention." Instead of answering her question, I do what Leary would have done: talk about what I want to talk about. "The media," I say, "is always trying to bury the ideals with the man. But this man lived a fulfilling life until the age of 75, disproving all the lies the media has told us about LSD. In this region, we have presidents of computer-software companies who admit to having used LSD, there are politicians who have used it, and, Margie, even some of the biggest members of the media have used it."

"Let's look a little bit at Tim Leary's life," says Reedy. "For you to say that he was completely happy. . . ."

"I didn't say that."

"He was divorced four times, his wife committed suicide, his daughter committed suicide, he was in and out of jail. . . ."

"Sounds like most people's lives, Margie!"

"It does?"

"C'mon Margie, we've all had human tragedy in our families. As I understand it, his wife committed suicide before he was into LSD, but look at how the media tries to discredit the ideas by disparaging the man. Leary was only human. He made mistakes. I don't agree with every single thing he did selling LSD as a public-relations campaign. But look at your own footage. This was not an unhappy man on the way out."

Boston-based novelist Mimi Hirsh, author of Dreaming Back (St. Martin's Press, 1996), who knew Leary when he lived in Newton three decades ago, is also on the show. She, too, strays from her assigned script -- she was supposed to tell "war stories" about the man -- to talk about hallucinogenic drugs and plants as important tools for unmediated religious experiences.

Reedy shifts back to me: "Al, do you think that Leary was right in taking the drugs himself, if, in fact, he was trying to see what the effects are on others?"

"I think he would have been wrong not to have tried a drug he was administering to others," I reply, poised to unveil our host's obvious disadvantage in this discussion. "This is also a problem with members of the media talking about these drugs who've never tried them. I have tried LSD, and the media has lied to us about its effects. . . . Often, Margie, the media doesn't get the joke. This business of Leary supposedly committing suicide on the Internet -- that was his final joke on you guys, and you didn't get it."

"I think we got it," insists Reedy, now speaking for the entire media. "We just thought it was weird."

"Well," I reply, "a lot of Americans think the media is weird."

The untold story of Leary's legacy is how millions of young people are using LSD, mushrooms, and other hallucinogens today -- in 1996 -- and not getting into trouble. Instead of showing up as drug-abuse statistics, these kids will be the CEOs, the artists, and the media spokespeople of the future. But all of us who are "experienced" have seen people persecuted with 15- and 20-year sentences for LSD (when a murderer convicted of manslaughter can get out in less than 10). And yes, young people have learned from their parents -- they've learned how not to get caught and how not to be hurt simply because they are having that psychedelics-induced "unmediated religious experience."

Don't talk to them too much about Leary; he's an icon of the past who shared many mistakes with the "straight" members of his generation, caught up in a web of patriarchy and technology. But check out the book section at any record store: today's youth are reading books such Food of the Gods (Bantam, 1992), by Terence McKenna, who nails a botanical treatise on the LSD church door with his ideas about psilocybin mushrooms and their role in human evolution. (McKenna's Web site reveals more: http://www.levity.com/eschaton/hyperborea.html.) They're finding encyclopedias of forbidden knowledge that use words no parent could possibly understand; check out the "Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension" Web site (http://www.levity.com/deoxy/).

Words, of course, will fail anyone who tries to explain the psychedelic experience. "At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstasy means," wrote the late New York banker R. Gordon Wasson, upon discovering, in the 1950s, hallucinogenic-mushroom use among the Mexican Indians. These plants and drugs offer sensations very different from the numbing dreamscape of heroin and other opiates, from the hopped-up hyper-reality of cocaine and speed, from the illusory screen and corresponding hangover of alcohol. There is really no way to understand the effect of these botanical and chemical agents without trying them.

A "trip on mushrooms or LSD begins with total confusion, the breakdown of linear thought, the realization of illusions and neuroses that come with being a member of this culture. I remember my first LSD experience, at age 15, as the night I looked at the television and noticed how unreal the portrayal of life there was. LSD, which came into widespread public use during the time media and technology began to enforce imposed fictions upon daily life, offered a better program to watch: one's own. No wonder the media badmouthed LSD; they no doubt recognized the drug as a competitor for the consciousness of consumers whose attention they rent to advertisers.

You won't read this in Newsweek or Time, but there's a world of hallucinogenic plants (some illegal, some not) and a wealth of information on how to use them safely -- all available to anyone seeking unmediated experience.

There are also lessons, illuminated by the mistakes of Leary's generation, that today's aficionados embrace: in a prohibitionist drug economy, we can't really trust that the LSD we're getting is pure. But we can learn to cultivate and identify psilocybin mushrooms with certainty. Psilocybin offers a trip that lasts about four hours, compared to LSD's eight, but which is at least as eye-opening, probably more so, than the trips provided by our parents' hallucinogen of choice. Better living through botany. Another lesson is that (short of a Grateful Dead concert, a ritual that was built around the needs and desires of hallucinogen users) there aren't really safe public places to use these drugs. "Take five grams of mushrooms, alone, in the dark," in a place where you will not be disturbed by non-initiates, is McKenna's axiom.

The notorious "bad trip" happens to some users in party settings, as a result of mixing the drug with alcohol or taking an impure product. First-timers have better results when aided by the experienced. And, though there's no guarantee that a psychedelic-drug experience won't send one into the most horrifying parts of her own psyche, most users report that, once those "imposed fictions" are smashed, there is indeed a sacred intelligence to be found. The hard work is incorporating the experience into one's daily life, when one must mingle with the rest of society. It is fear of the consequences, of losing one's freedom or economic livelihood, that keeps most initiates from speaking, from writing, from sharing their methods of translating the ineffable.

The US government, which brought us LSD through the CIA and military research, has finally ended its Thirty Years' War against the study of these hallucinogens. At the end of the Bush Administration, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) gave approval to resume tests of LSD as a key component in the successful treatment of alcoholism. If early indications are accurate, a drug the establishment has criticized as part of the "disease" is, in fact, part of the cure (the Multi-Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which tracks this research, can be reached at MAPS, 1801 Tippah Avenue, Charlotte, NC 28205, 704-358-9830; Web site: http://www.maps.org/).

Television, too, is a drug. One, frankly, that Leary abused as much as any. Back at New England Cable News, Margie Reedy persists: "Al, how are the parents who did these drugs dealing with their kids who do them?"

"There are some parents who understand that if kids are going to use drugs -- and they are -- it's better that they use them responsibly," I say. "These DARE programs and the Partnership for an Unfree America have perpetrated lies on us all. It's not anywhere near as dangerous as they say."

"But would young people follow Leary now?" Reedy wants to know. "Who will they follow?"

That question contains an answer. Today's psychedelic youth -- more hallucino-punks than flower children -- reject the positivist imagery of the 1960s, preferring to craft their own, superior, approach.

"Young people know not to follow leaders," I insist. "They trust their own leadership to define their daily lives. I asked a friend of mine who is 24 whether today's youth would ever be moved by messages of affirmation. He said, `No, we will not go for a utopia in some unrealizable future if it means taking away the present.' The revolution is not something of the past or the future. It must be now."

That's the message of LSD, of hallucinogenic plants, and of Tim Leary and others who shepherded us into the present. Leary's passage from man to myth last week means that the ongoing revival of unmediated religious experience is no longer saddled with his human frailties -- just with our own. Leary's death creates an opportunity for today's psychedelic enthusiasts to make up our own language and imagery. It means we won't be as tainted by Day-Glo media versions of '60s psychedelia when we give voice to our own experience.

After the program, Reedy and guests move into the NECN newsroom, where people are abuzz from having witnessed the show. "Hey Margie," yells one reporter from her desk, "Wanna go out and do a bong hit? Ha ha ha!"

"That was great!" says one of the sports guys. "Do you have Leary's Web address?" (Why, of course: http://www.leary.com/.)

"Al," says one of the producers, coming out of the control room, "if my son sees that show, you'll have made me a hero to him."

Or, as one other "mainstream" scribe whispers to me, "I remember. . . ."

The newsroom, usually full of stress and focused on the next deadline, comes alive for one utopian moment. The initiates, mostly closeted with their own psychedelic experiences, are having the last laugh.

The media tell us that LSD divided our parents from their parents. But hallucinogens are, in part, about paradox and its beauty. There is a hidden wellspring of desire among members of older generations who feel that, for the purposes of economic survival, they can remember their positive psychedelic experiences only behind closed doors. Young people -- whose present-day desires deserve more respect -- may find in Leary's legacy a delicious irony: LSD and other hallucinogens, right down to the innocuous plant called hemp, provide us with a secret intergenerational bond.

There will always be those people who don't get the joke. They are still hurting us with imprisonment and other mechanisms of control. We remove those chains each time we serve our immediate desires and refuse to live in fear of our future or our past. We remember the thousands of innocents who are in prison because of hallucinogen use, and know we can't claim "we won." But each time we steal the moment, we can certainly voice the more meaningful present-tense words "we win."