Ok, smoking pills:
In the old days, if you smoked a pill you would be smoking:
1. the principle ingredient - in this case opiates, some of which vaporize quite nicely - so fine
2. Cellulose - the stuff that makes the pill break down very fast in your body
3. Sugars and binders
4. Colorant
5. Possibly an enteric or time release coating
6. Depending upon the formulation you might also get some aspirin or acetominiphin.
Weigh the pill on any scale and you may see it weigh 50 or 100 or 300 mg. Now subtract the amount of active ingredient.
That is what you are turning into smoke and putting in your lungs.
So for some reason you want to smoke a norco (I don't even know if hydro works that way)
you are smoking 10 mg of hydrocodone and 325 mg of acetominiphin - probably not good
The cellulose? not much of a problem, the enteric coating? not a big deal, the sugars, welll...... not all that bad, people smoke lots of sugar, the binders? probably not horrible either.
Now fast forward to today - you have your 40 mg of time release oxycodone. You have 40 mg of the active ingredient that does indeed vaporize and does work (as evidence by the woman rolling her pill down an aluminum foil sheet while chasing it with a straw and a lighter.
Fine, but you also have about 120 mg of - unknown, sticky, plastic kind of stuff that barely dissolves in water and likely the results from combustion will not either (well, more than likely - there is a new tequnique called "crisping" that entails heating up the pill and then washing it - the brown stuff is insoluable)
so there is pretty much no difference between smoking this and smoking a large chicklett after you have broken off the sugar coating.
After all of this - if you are intent on smoking a pill, it probably won't hurt you but it is unlikely that you are just going to smoke one pill
and you may get a rush but it is almost certain that you will not get all of the precious substance in your body as you would if you snort it, eat it, place it in your bung hole, inject it subcutaniously or into a muscle or... into a more main line.
that last one is the most efficient, the most useful and the most deadly when you are converting pills into something else.
And by the way - that timerx stuff they use to inhibit abuse of opana? works pretty good, they are getting very very clever and soon you can kiss your semisynthetics good by - the only thing left to do will be to hook down a handful of time release and hang on.
And I am not even sure about that - I am afraid that these things will release no more quickly when multiples are eaten if they stick together.