>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid.

Indeed, with proper dosage long term recreational use of heroin is far less likely to cause lasting damage than alcohol or tobacco.

Heroin is already safer than tobacco and alcohol.

Deaths per year from Heroin: 13,000

Deaths per year from Alcohol: 88,000

Deaths per year from Tobacco: 440,000

Hmm...

Do those stats account for different populations of users? I imagine there are far more people using alcohol and tobacco.

I hope you are not serious...

No, because it's completely true. Repeated use of either tobacco or alcohol cause definite harm - cancer for tobacco (note, not nicotine...), brain and liver damage for alcohol. Heroin doesn't. Long term opioid use can cause hyperalgesia for _some_ people, but by no means all, and that's really if you take them every day at high doses (and heroin is actually not so bad for this - it differs from opioid to opioid), which is a little weird since morphine is quite the opposite - I suspect this is because the active metabolite responsible for the primary effects (heroin is really a prodrug) is morphine-6-glucoronide (M6G), not actually morphine as many would expect.

>To say heroin and alcohol/tobacco are equivalent would be stupid.

It doesn't sound like you have any experience with drugs or medicine outside of what you learned in D.A.R.E.