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Hospitals and surgery can be especially frightening for children, and to help lessen young patients’ anxiety, one drug company has been experimenting with sedative “lollipops.” Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved further testing of sweet-tasting fentanyl suckers on children, despite protests from a consumer health group that the lollipop form will give kids the idea that drugs are candy. Fentanyl, a widely used narcotic anesthetic agent, is 200 times more potent than morphine. Fentanyl lollipops can ease kids’ separation from their parents and make the administration of anesthesia go more smoothly, according to a member of the team that tested them. But the Public Citizen Health Research Group, alarmed by what it believes is a danger to children and a new opportunity for drug abuse, urged the FDA to call a halt to the experiments.

 Fentanyl is so addictive, according to the Group’s director, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, that its widespread availability could cause drug-abuse problems. He suggests that hospitals develop other ways to calm young patients, such as making greater use of play therapy and allowing parents to accompany children into the operating room. 

Dr. Gary Henderson, a pharmacologist and an authority on fentanyl abuse, doubts that carefully controlled use of the drug in a hospital setting would pose a danger or suggest to kids that drugs are like candy. “Children will associate few things in the hospital with a pleasant experience,” he says.