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From one meditative perspective...

The limitation of having drugs being the primary creator of mind-altering
experiences is that such experiences usually occur in the absence of a practice that can adequately prep one for a complete digestion of such a journey.

Traditionally this is spoken of as a "storming of heaven" that short changes the full spiritual potential that any path walker might have otherwise had when all conditions had ripened enough to allow it to occur naturally when the individual was truly ready to digest it.

On the Buddhist path towards suffering's cessation, much emphasis is placed upon knowing how to accept such spiritual inheritances in such a way as to minimize it becoming subject to the habituated influences of the human ego.
While few experiences can be compared to such graces, the mere experience of it does not dictate in itself that it will spiritually result in more benefit than
deficit. Prematurely unearthed by the unprepared can often make it look more like a short cut into a minefield.

The most intractable and compounded delusions that I think I've witnessed have occurred from those on the far side of such attempted "stormings of heaven".

@Jeroen said:
I’ve been reading a forum about Ayahuasca recently, and its been very interesting. There was one topic about “claridade”, which seems to be a phenomenon where people have been exposed to a mind-altering vision and have come to the conclusion that ‘they know the truth’ and go about talking about it to all kinds of people as if they should acknowledge it too.

Now I can think of some people who have come to this experience without any kind of psychoactive substance, mostly religious people. It is certainly not restricted to Ayahuasca tea drinkers. But I find it very interesting that it is such a common phenomenon that they have a word for it. It seems to be so that the mind can be overpowered by religious and other experiences to accept ‘truth’ at a deep level.

What I note here is that without some sort of indoctrination before hand, all these "truths" contradict each other unless they happen at the same time and influence each other.

I used to "trip" quite a bit when I was younger and there were a few of us that really liked exploring the spiritual side of things and every time we thought we "had it" we forgot it by morning or it just didn't make sense any more when the trip wore off.

Now it seems some kinds of mind-altering experiences function to break down boundaries and belief structures, like some forms of psilocybin mushrooms, and I think also my own hypnagogic experiences. Terence McKenna used to talk about this a lot, and he once said “the people who need it the most, don’t take it”, referring to politicians and people in positions of authority.

That's a big distinction and a tricky bit. Psilocybin, for example, can help break boundaries and belief structures but it can also help build them. One can lead to a breakthrough and one can lead to a delusion.

From a certain perspective, it can sometimes be hard to tell one from the other.

Railing against the weather often seems as useful as our railing against the effects of birth, old age disease and death. Few things disturb as surely as our inevitable experience of the underlying entropy of all of existence. Here, natural and un-natural disasters get imagined to be some intruding chaos breaking through some wider potential calm of a normal existence. What imagines such a thing?
Here, are we not Mayflies dreaming of the possibility of another day of life?
Is such a view not just the limit of a self?
Like a questioning of whether its best to grab a poisonous snake in the wild by the head or the tail, when such a question only obfuscates all the alternative options of how to possibly act in the presence of a harmful snake.

It takes an agonizingly long time for society at large to recognize these trends. Almost four decades ago I was studying molecular biology/biochemistry and the professors were stridently warning about the coming impacts of increasing atmospheric CO2 from energy use. What they were saying then is only now widely recognized, and there are still significant proportions of climate deniers. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962.

Astute we are not. Interestingly, the prescient warnings came remarkably early, though sadly (perhaps disastrously) unheeded.

Your catastrophic flooding, our (North America) bomb cyclones, African famines, were all predicted by science long, long ago.