Edit: i highly recommend watching Michael Pollan's "How to change your mind" (Netflix documentary). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8LRb4jfZ9g
Assuming equal efficacy is possible in the first place, and assuming every human is even capable of reaching those levels, there are people who can't spend the sometimes years it takes to practice meditation to a point where they can achieve psychidelic efficacy.
Why not have both available and you can do you?
> Donny: Panaeolus cyanescens, psychadellic.
> Lez: What do they do to ya?
> Sassy: Take you on a journey of self-discovery, you find out who you really are, this and that.
> Donny: Either that or you trip out for four or six hours. But in our current situation this will be really good for us, gunna heighten our senses so we'll be way more in tune with our surroundings.
> Lez: These heighten senses?
> Donny: They heighten senses you didn't even know you had.
> Lez: Have we got more than five?
> Donny: So many.
> Lez: How do I turn them on?
> Sassy: Meditate.
> Donny: Yeah meditation's probably the best way. Or, trip out on some psychedelic mushrooms.
If one or two guided trips can transform someone's relationship to death, that's hugely valuable.
I actually don't think it's worth comparing the two. They achieve a similar end goal depending on your intentionality but I don't think it's fruitful to say one is better than the other.
> They seem like a pointless shortcut, and potentially a problematic one.
Psychedelics certainly have a higher ability to be abused. People need to be educated on looking at their family mental health history, they need an informed trip sitter, and they need to be well informed on what the experience will entail.
On the other hand, how many guru cults that incorporate meditation as a form of psychological warfare and isolation have we witnessed in our lifetimes? The people who are casually allowed to walk around and profess themselves as prophets or gurus is highly adjacent to the consequences of ill-informed ego death and return in the psychedelic space.
> If the hallucinatory dynamic is specifically what you care about, that's also typical of perfectly ordinary experiences such as dreaming, or even just drifting in and out of sleep
Psilocybin, LSD, and DMT are nothing like dreaming. They're very vivid experiences. They can rip you out of your rooting in this reality which is why, imo, they're not good to do unless you have an informed trip sitter who can ensure your mental, emotional, and physical safety. That's what also makes them powerful teachers in the way of perspective; imo, it's not that you're "unlocking secrets to the universe" during a trip, moreso you've been granted a perspective outside of your sense of self that is difficult to achieve otherwise. Depending on the dose it could also be total dissolution of the ego. These things wear off, of course, but someone who can help you do a "soft landing" in the case where you run into some trauma makes a huge difference. The things you process afterward are where "the work" is done.
> What "treasure" are we gaining by dosing the brain with chemicals, that we couldn't otherwise?
You could meditate until your ego dies and likely achieve many of the same machinations from what I've read from peoples testimonies. Again, the work isn't done during meditation, it's how you decompose your experience and incorporate it into your life later. Psychedelics are the same, just a different mechanism that you cannot choose to say "I'm done" halfway through.
147 psychedelic deaths over three years - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523208/
I'll have to find a youtube video but there's a good one with one of the psychdelic guru's describing a trip where had mis-dosed (he didn't realize the mushrooms he was consuming were significantly stronger than anticipated) and he ended up stuck in a "loop" of not being able to start his car.. for three or four hours. His exprience was distressing but not much of an injury, but he then delves into a story about how a similar loop resulted in one of his friends dying from repeatedly falling into cement.
Having just one go slightly sideways would make me really cautious. I was because freshman year I found some random pre-frosh who had hidden in a closet cause they thought they'd be in trouble (they were not, wet campus) who needed help.
Instead, it appears to investigate psychoactive drug deaths not to do with overdose.
There appear to be no "traditional" psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, etc) covered here _at all_ except perhaps one death categorized as a "hallucinogen", which is definitely a lot less than 100% of the 147 deaths investigated.