Alcohol and heroin are not even close in terms of danger and having had a friend who I lost to heroin it sounds odd that someone makes that comparison.
Both heroin and alcohol are dangerous, but as alcohol is socially acceptable and widely available in a different forms, the perception of the danger differs. It's not a question for which drug we lose more people per year (alcohol is by far the clear winner here). It's a perception of these losses are different, and makes us believe that other drugs are more dangerous.
If this is actually true, the real takeway is that heroine is not nearly as bad as we've been led to believe and we should all go experiment this weekend.
Here is one of the cited articles from 2010: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...