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.