It’s an interesting point mate.
About halfway in to my 2010 Afghan' tour we were issued 2 x fentanyl lollipops per man, for pain relief.
They superseded the morphine auto-injectors we had been carrying.
The Fent lollipops were a lot more potent than the morphine.
They Fent-pops were a massive improvement over the morphine pens as they got into the system and started working a lot quicker. Plus the way they were administered orally was better than the spring loaded needle of the auto-injector that blasted the casualty with 20mg of morphine, usually into the thigh.
You could give the pop to a casualty to suck on and they'd pretty much get instant relief, and would then usually then stop sucking on it. So the pain relief was more measured as opposed to just blasting 20mg of morphine into someone no matter what.
Its crazy to think that people are either knowingly using fentanyl, or unknowingly taking it as it is cut into different things ?