There were two types of patches. The gel kind which were super dangerous and hard to use since you had to squeeze a gel put to eat or shoot or the kind that you could peel off a layer of the chemical from the plastic part of the patch and stick it on to tin foil and smoke with a pen tube.
I never was into any of that but had a friend who was an addict and he told me it was like the crack cocaine of opiates, he said the high was immediate, even faster than snorting, and the rush was nearly as good as shooting up but like with crack the faster onset and rush meant less longer lasting high so you need more faster. It also makes your tolerance sky rocket to opiates which is why it's so dangerous, some people were smoking multiple patches a day which were meant for 72 hour slow release.
At the high point fentanyl patches were being sold for 400 bucks a patch here. Now all people prescribed to them need to hand the used patches back in that plus the introduction of pure fentanyl powder the market for patches is gone.
Man I am so glad my body doesn't like the feeling any drugs give me and I never got addicted to anything, mind you I've only tried pot, Percocet, and nothing too crazy. I've tried mushrooms and like them but they aren't something you can ever get addicted to.
Pot makes me paranoid as crazy and makes me question every life decision I ever made and gives me panick attacks. It doesn't make me feel good at all. Percs made me sick even from just 1 I was prescribed some for a broken leg and found out I'm extremely sensitive to opiates, they made me hallucinate but not the fun kind like mushrooms, they gave me delerium and which means I was actually seeing full people that were not there without any way to know they were not real and spiders crawling on me, which gave me another panick attack and I had to be hospitalized.
I had surgery after that to get my appendix taken out and they gave me a bunch of opiates when I was under and I flatlined and woke up extremely fucked up and was kept for a few days.
Apparently a very small percentage of people react very badly to opiates.