“No doubt that heroin is a bad substance, but I think alcohol is just as bad. Both can kill you if you consume more than your body can tolerate. Just as both can, and often do, destroy entire families.”
You are correct, however, the important distinction to make is “How Long Does It Take For The Person Making Bad Choices To Become Hopeless Addicted”.
Becoming an alcoholic takes a little while. You don’t just pop open a Sam Adam’s and start selling all your stuff to support your habit. Although the exact amount of time it takes to swing from being a social drinker to someone with an alcohol problem varies from person to person, I would suggest that the individual has lots of time to consider the ramdicafations of their actions compared to an opiate user.
Opiates rewire your brain’s network in a pretty short amount of time. After only a couple of weeks, you will have severe physical withdrawl symptoms and your brain chemistry will stop recognizing things other than heroin as being able to bring the brain pleasure.
In all fairness, you can get very severe detox from alcohol as well, but getting to that point takes a lot longer then it does with opiates.
You are very correct that both of them are bad choices that lead people down horrible roads, and that families are tragically impacted.
While I agree with your overall statement that the time it takes to become addicted is much shorter for heroin than alcohol, I disagree with the two weeks time frame. Mainly because no one starting out experimenting with heroin does it that regularly, unless someone is forcing it upon them.