Discussing that one country has more helthy heroin mass-consumption culture than another country hopefully sounds odd to everyone.
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 less 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...
Not trying to convince you to change your mind, but you seem to be missing some information: I'd wager that for the vast, vast majority of people, "drinking alcohol" in a typical way rarely means "being drunk." At least in US culture, those things are only synonymous for certain specific groups, like people to whom drinking is novel (think college students) or alcoholics. Your mileage may vary, of course, and lots of this is my perception, but "benefits of drinking" and "benefits of being drunk" are definitely not the same conversations.