Jeeze, did you even read the article you linked when pointing out heroin as the big bad or did you just look for the first article that had a bar graph with heroin seemingly on the top? It basically contradicts your entire attitude about heroin, and reaffirms the thought process of the person you're quoting, even if it was an exaggeration.
Here, let me quote something from your own link:
Firstly, the harms of a given drug will depend upon its legal status. The best way to demonstrate this point is with heroin, which is placed at the top of the Lancet-scale as the most harmful of all drugs. For street heroin this may well be the appropriate placing, but, if we are being scientific here, it is imperative to separate out the harms that follow from use of the drug per se, and the health and social harms exacerbated or created specifically by the drug's use within an illegal market. These, lets call them 'prohibition harms', include:
* Contaminated/cut product (poisoning, infection risks)
* Dirty/shared needles (Hep C / HIV risk)
* Vast quantities of low level acquisitive property crime to support a habit: illegal markets inflate the cost of an essentially worthless agricultural product to one that is worth more than its weight in gold. People on prescriptions don't have to nick stuff.
* Street prostitution (see above)
* Street dealing, drug-gang violence and turf wars
* Drug litter (needles in the gutter etc)
More useful would have been to rank both illegal street heroin, associated with the above harms which aren't going to help its ranking much, and prescribed pharmaceutical heroin, associated with none of the above harms. The latter would certainly be considerably further down the scale. Luckily, we can theoretically do this with heroin as both legal and illegal markets exist simultaneously in the UK, although the number of prescribed users (approx 400) is rather eclipsed by the number of illicit users (approx 250,000+). It’s a great shame the authors of this study failed to make that comparison (we do, confusingly, get 'street methadone' in the ranking, but not the prescription variety).
The harms from heroin don't generally come from heroin itself, but from the unsafe creation and use pervasive of today's users as a result of being illegal.