PLAY TELEVISION CODEINE LAW CASTS SHADOW

maker Louis Theroux has warned Australia to brace itself for the consequences of next year’s ban on overthe- counter codeine.

In his upcoming documentary, Heroin Town, Theroux spent time in Huntington, West Virginia, in the US where widespread addiction to opioid painkillers, and a subsequent crackdown on their overprescription has pushed many to turn to heroin, and the fatal overdose rate is 13 times the national average. Next year, Australians will have prescription- only access to painkillers containing the opioid codeine following a report that the number of accidental deaths from opioid- related overdoses had doubled since 2007.

“Everyone in America now knows what’s going on and they know that Big Pharma caused rampant addiction and that once they clamped down on it the people involved migrated to heroin, but even with that knowledge it doesn’t become totally clear what the best way forward is,” he said.

Theroux, who has been making documentaries for almost 20 years, recently relocated with his family from the UK to the US, fertile ground for his doco work.

“West Virginia is prime Trump terrain,” he said. “With Trump in the White House no one quite knows what’s going to happen from one day to the next. What I’d love to do is make a theatrical release, a 90- minute documentary, somehow about Trump and Trump’s supporters, but that’s still something that we’re developing.”