Sure, orally one needs a much higher dose to feel it but hey, it's not a last resort painkiller and it's not a standard like in some poor African country where morphine is the only opioid available for pain. You want to get rid of your pain with a pill, take hydrocodone or oxycodone. In the US you've got it right sorted out that such drugs are available. In Poland oxycodone is sold at a very high price and it's entered the market not long ago after it had been gone for like 10 years. BTW soldiers get shots so morphine acts almost instantly.

But still I guess they waste a lot hitting in muscles 'cause it's easier on a battlefield than looking for a vein. Nothing is an absolute miracle, well, morphine's not either both in terms of pain and drug preference but actually so many times trials showed than addicts feel no difference between heroin and morphine but then again it's getting really off-topic...
Morphine is better when you need to manage your pain quickly so a single dose is injected or a machine giving it slower is used (like for these patients who are going to die and there's no help for them and they've got some fixed dose per hour). Also, morphine, when given orally, is mostly used in extended release form so it really counteracts pain and its levels get higher with repeated doses. I don't know how it works for some severe pain like cancer. It definitely numbed me back in the day when I could still get something from i.v.'ing
reasonable doses, but now 200mg of morphine sulphate would have to go straight to my bloodstream so I could feel it. Still, one person will get better results from morphine, the other from e.g. buprenorphine, and do notice that oxycodone is not given to such patients i.v. that often, at least I haven't seen it, even in the UK and hey, they've got diamorphine hydrochloride here

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If I still did opioids and didn't control my addiction with methadone, well, if I still shoot up such drugs (well I've broken recently and had a short binge on levorphanol and dihydroheterocodeine but it's nothing to what I've been through so I'm easily on methadone again), I would choose morphine anytime over heroin or oxycodone, or even hydromorphone, or oxymorphone if it was for relatively quick rush. BTW levorphanol is now a great painkiller with a much wider spectrum than regular 4,5-epoxymorphinan, shame there's no short way to it from drotebanol, it'd be easy to synthesize it and maybe it would be marketed again. Lasts long and beats everything with its additive NMDA blocking properties, some sigma agonism, and SNRI activity.