I agree: I know of no wisdom that has come to anyone from opiates beyond those things related to opiates themselves, namely that they control pain, are constipating, sedating and very addictive, can make people vomit, cause rashes, rapidly induce tolerance, may amplify the perception of pain once tolerance has set in, have a nasty withdrawal period, and have other downsides.
Oh, there's another kind of (conventional) wisdom that come with opiates. I now understand why some unfortunate people spend their entire lives chasing their next high at the expense of everything else. Which is a sad insight.
As to entheogens, the purist in me would like a world where people simply did clean meditative practices, attained to wisdom and a range of attention-control competencies on thier own power, and that was that. Then we have the real world...
Hey, me too!
In the real world, loads of people do entheogens, and some get wisdom from them. Others freak out on them. Some just have strange or interesting experiences. Some have serious side effects. Most don't. A few end up in jail, psychotic or dead.
I agree that we live in a world where almost everyone has taken some kind of entheogen, and one could argue that psychoactives in general have played an important part in human history and evolution for tens of thousands of years. That being said, one could make the case that entheogens cover A&P territory. I personally have never heard of anyone getting stream-entry on LSD, though I could very well be wrong, and I would like to hear about it if it has happened.
Another thing worth considering: if someone drops acid and crosses the A&P without knowing what was happening, they've got a big problem. It is true that the A&P can zap people simply going about their lives, but entheogens make it more likely to happen without meditative training.
That said, in my own life, it is entirely possible and actually very likely that, had a good friend not dropped 4 hits of acid one day and crossed the A&P, which later lead to all sorts of other relatively beneficial effects, I would have never found the meditative things that I found.
Well, true, I suppose none of us would be here if he hadn't done that.
As many have noted here, there are insights that come from them, and plenty of people get into meditative territory on them that they couldn't have dreamed of until that point. Unfortunately, it is a total crap-shoot, and there is no telling if someone will get insights or have something bad happen. The risks, in my view, are definitely higher with entheogens. That said, intensive meditation practice is not necessarily safe either, as plenty here will attest. Were there not the legal stigma around these things, perhaps real science could be done to help sort this out. Until then, we have case reports of variable quality and communities to help make sense of what happens in the real world.
Speaking of legal stigma, I feel inclined to say that anyone posting about the use of entheogens should take the necessary steps to anonymize themselves, such as talking about "a friend of a friend" instead of themselves.
Hopefully the drug war will come to an end in the next couple of decades, but Americans have a bad habit of electing the same morons over and over...