As with most things with opposite characteristics, there is an underlying understanding of them that can appears at a higher level of understanding. This is my opinion of the understanding of what that underlying identity is. Psychedelic drugs are dangerous because they can induce a bad trip and a paranoid irrational, even dangerous response from a person so effected. To escape the experience, to keep it clamped down, repressed in the unconscious, a person can experience the feeling that one is dying and do anything to try to escape, including having a total psychic break. This happens because the drug can smash through the barriers we have in our minds that protect our ego from bad things we were made to feel in the past, driving them toward conscious memory which we would do anything to keep from happening.
Ignorance of what is really happening, not that we are dying but merely remembering a time when we died psychically, and thus fighting with all our might to stay alive, rather than seizing that as an opportunity to let go with the realization that we are only feeling things we did not know we already and always feel repressed on a daily basis for so so many years, mistaking reality for what is real in our feelings but a lie in fact.
So taking a psychedelic can be like instant psychotherapy, where you blast right through psychic death and are reborn in heaven or get stuck and not making it all the way through, trapped in a state of associations of endless negative thoughts.
So the danger of psychedelic drugs are basic self ignorance, not knowing beforehand the real nature of a bad trip, that nothing negative will happen to you if you allow or manage somehow to die, to let go, to descend into ones inner hell. All of this is well described by the hero's journey, the slaying of dragons with a sword of will and a mirror shield into which one can see the hydra without turning to stone.
The good side of psychedelic drugs is that they can open one to states of consciousness we did not know exist, the collapse of ego and the awareness of Oneness. An ego that has ceased to exist doesn't really need to fear death as there isn't anywhere in unity for separateness to exist.
Of course when the drugs wear off the ego self returns. I suspect there may be other paths where that does not necessarily happen. I know, for example, there are things like Zen Masters and Avatars, Prophets, etc. Not so sure they are here in this world in the ordinary way we experience it.
TLDR: Drugs are dangerous because they can bring into conscious what we really feel. Drugs can be of tremendous benefit because they can bring into conscious what we really feel. What we feel is our inner truth and it is also a lie. Taking what we feel as the truth is the danger. Seeing it for a lie by allowing it to be felt to the root can transform ones inner state in a profoundly positive way. This can also happen without the use of drugs.
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