If you've ever talked to any veterans from WWII, or watched a documentary or two on the right topic, you'll hear about men drinking rocket fuel, rubbing alcohol-- anything close to liquor to stave off the DTs, apparently. When I worked at the nursing home, one of the nurses had worked in VA hospitals* for years, and she'd seen this kind of thing often and close up, relating stories of little old men weighing 130 pound requiring three or four orderlies to keep them from hurting themselves or others with their fits once they were finally denied a drink for long enough.
    Heroin fatalities, from what I've read and heard, come more often from overdoses: too much, or too pure a dose. In theory, I guess, a heroin user could- with a clean supply and an eye toward restraint- take the drug for the rest of their lives. Alcohol deaths, on a guess, take place more often in hospitals than at home, and it's easier for the family to conceal (if they want) the actual cause of death; with heroin, death usually occurs in public (ie not at a hospital), and hence is less easy to obscure. The real heyday for DT deaths was during the world wars, too, when there were lots of soldiers dying for a lot of reasons, and a couple hundred alcohol deaths was easy to overlook.
    I want to be abundantly clear about one thing, though: I never want to imply that heroin withdrawal was anything less than nasty and terrible. The discrepancy is between the media accounts (sensationalist, usually) about how bad it is, and how bad heroin withdrawal is compared to another, very legal drug, are what is troubling, or at least curious.

    *As she noted, alcoholism was almost required for many years in the military, especially if you were an officer in peacetime. Many functions and events to attend, and liquor present (and urged, especially in the 40s and 50s) at every one. This nurse was hardly PC either: she was from Texas, and proud of that and her rough and tumble attitude. IIRC, she even missed wearing those nurses caps . . .

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

Alchohol withdrawl can be fatal:

"Despite appropriate treatment, the current mortality for patients with DTs ranges from 5-15%. Mortality was as high as 35% prior to the era of intensive care and advanced pharmacotherapy. The most common conditions leading to death in these patients are respiratory failure and cardiac arrhythmias. "

    Well, the folks who profit directly would be anyone who writes (or "writes") a memoir about their addiction that anyone cares to read: rock stars, actors, comedians, say, but also less famous folks hungry enough to sell their past misfortune to sell some books. (Think James Frey, without the lying, though his drug was crack, apparently.) Publishers who profit from sensationalism also directly stand to gain, though that's a less direct explanation-- the "ex-drunk on a mission" type of book was around well before heroin ever became a source of public concern, and continues to this day. (Eg. Drinking: A Love Story, and at least two other memoirs that I can't recall the exact title at this moment.)
    Law enforcement agencies have had a stake in this perception, for many reasons. In the most charitable take, it's an attempt to prevent what addictions they can; Prohibition is never coming back, so pointing out that liquor is addictive is a waste of money that could be spent trying to combat meth, crack and heroin. In a less charitable take, it was a tool in the battle over federal funding, a way for city police departments to argue that they deserved more funding because they were dealing with worse problems. (This presumes that you think of heroin as primarily an urban phenomenon, an assumption that's dubious, to say the least.) At the policy making level, heroin (with other drugs) was the substance for which marijuana was a "gateway drug". If heroin withdrawal was perceived (rightly or wrongly) as no big deal compared to alcohol . . well, let's just say the 60s would have turned out a lot differently.
     Liquor companies have a huge stake in keeping their product looking benign, normal, even healthy. How much you can argue these companies profit directly from being able to fund massive advertising targeting a younger (and hence not yet addicted) market depends on whether you think they're marketing the glitz and glamor of youth, or whether they're seeking to addict new customers for the long haul. IMO, both trends are at work, and both are helped by heroin and other hard drugs as bogeymen in a "drug war" that doesn't include beer, wine or liquor . . .
    At least that's what I can think of off the top of my head.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras