The only real problem is that a genuine drought may be used as an opportunity to change the game - once people start thinking the drug is gone forever, dealers may pretend the drought has broken by selling fake heroin with fentanyl or a similar fentalogue. It is difficult to use it as an adulterant at the moment as it does not melt, the fumes only claimed by sucking up every atom of smoke as the brown powder frazzled down the plate, but it is so strong you can still get high 'chasing' the shit.
I'm glad the fentanyl hasn't hit you guys yet, but I think it would be pretty realistic to combine like 25mg of 10% fentanyl powder (as it's already diluted when it comes into North America) with 50mg of caffeine and 75mg of paracetamol, for a 0.15g bag that would hit similarly to your usual 0.15 of freebase heroin when smoked (if it's still at 35-45% purity), except for shorter legs. If you did mix citric or ascorbic acid in with it, thinking it was base, nothing bad would happen to the fentanyl in it AFAIK.
In my area, we are still getting legitimate black tar heroin, which usually was chased on foil only by middle-class (or Mexican) addicts, not by the mass of white/black junkies on the street who had a strong culture of injecting. (Tar can be chased pretty well on foil, though it's harder to stomach than your Afgan dope and more tends to be wasted in the process.) We're now getting cheap "blues" in addition to the black, pressed pills that the street users are clamoring for, though everyone knows they just contain fentanyl.
The pills can be snorted as is or dissolved (possibly requiring citric), but pretty much everyone smokes them, at least among people I know and all the sidewalk smokers that I notice doing their thing. I would bet it's fentanyl hydrochloride and not fentanyl base, but the pills do manage to run down the foil like heroin, and they do deliver a good rush that way -- at $8-9 a pill on the street, they seem kind of pricey to me, but they're certainly popular.
The "blues" smell like burnt popcorn when you smoke them, which is very pungent and distinctive outside, but. we're riding a kind of extreme anti-police wave in my city. There's basically no enforcement of drug laws (using or selling), which has openly dominated a whole block right in the heart of the tourist area since COVID started. The idea that they are "made to be smoked" is appealing, since most IV users here lose their veins at least as fast as Euro/UK injectors using acid, if not faster (assuming they don't use good filters or baking soda).
Here, we never used to inject in the groin/femoral, though some people would go for the jugular -- the default option was "muscling" the dope straight into the flesh with a long needle, which is something UK injectors pretty much avoid in favor of the groin, right? [As a side note, it seems like groin injecting has caught on quite a bit in these parts over the last 5-10 years -- ironically might be a "harm production" side effect of sites like Bluelight... I'm seeing a ton of lower-leg amputations on my trips through downtown, and my assumption is that groin injecting has caused it... not sure if that's actually true though, I'd be interested to know what you see in the UK as far as DVT complications, etc..]
Ultimately, I think the Afghan economy might be too dependent on the opium crop for it to be worthwhile switching over to fentanyl, especially when it has such a bad reputation. The Mexican drug economy is different: a lot more ruthless and competitive, a lot more industrialized with far less in the way of traditional growers who depend on drug crops for their livelihood, not to mention sharing a hugely busy land border with its #1 consumer nation, and having experience with synthetics for a while previously (like the ultra-pure crystal meth coming out of "super-labs" for the last decade).
