I like drugs, specially when they help some other people make wonderful music. Simon Posford would never be DJ Hallucinogen without hallucinogens. 

But it's mostly a platonic love, not epicurean. It's all so unpredictable. I had a friend who can smoke pot like every day, without problems. But it would make me extremely oversensitive in all senses including the etheric tactile, and therefore left very vulnerable, in bad mood and no way to end this for hours.

Apparently, down-to-earth people have nerves they could hang on with full weight and dipping their ends in some substance won't spoil their day. 
On the other side, I can achieve psychedelic states spontaneously, with some effort or even more easily with help of the right music. For me, music is a powerful psychedelic stuff, but it is completely under my control. I can pick it carefully and switch it off any time needed. This I can really appreciate after a couple of bad experiences with ganja.

Yeah, that's what it is about. Except that it isn't any "Mind at Large", but a raw experience of astral dimension. Which is a really messy place nowadays, something between Hollywood, Las Vegas, dump yard, madhouse and battlefield. According to some esotericists, somewhere in there is the source of all evil. And psychonauts go there drugged, fools.

 Psychedelics don't have to decrease brain activity. They just throw our inner spongy censor out of sync with this reality, so uncensored astral perception floods in. No wonder the brain is agitated. But Mr Harris really should read Robert Allan Monroe.

We should be grateful for our dense-physical body and sober consciousness, it's our fortress against certain undesirable things that usually protects us, unless we stick out our head too much. There is a lot of comfort in thinking, that this "subjective" world is illusory and powerless against a healthy waking consciousness and that enemies we may have there can never halfway materialize. For most of people this presumption holds well in practice too. I'm just not one of them. 

Do I refuse physicalism? Not exactly, but I'd like to see it redefined, with discovery of new forms of life-supporting matter that is from our point of view ghost-like and dispersed compared to ours, yet immensely more durable, radiant and much more pliable to the force of thought than the rusty and creaky wheels of our brain.

So what is the meaning of life? It is certainly not lingering in the realms, as the Shpongle song tells us. It is bringing the highest qualities of these realms here, into physical reality. This is why creative stuff like art is the most accessible form of spirituality there ever was. But the really valuable principles and qualities much be sought much higher (deeper) than in the astral realm, where drugs take us. On the deepest levels people experience (instead of fancy hallucinations) a deep love and unity with each other and they seek to manifest this unity externally, in social and political structures, art and even religion. 

The meaning of all this is to build such a rapport with the highest qualities of ourselves found there, that we will be able to reproduce ideas from there in physical form precisely and adequately. That means, without being distracted by fancy visual imagery or exalted feelings.