Our Bodies, Our Lives - The Right to Try

Thanks, but no thanks for any government "help." m/r

The Right to Try | National Review Online

By Amity Shlaes  5-14-14

A new movement aims to make experimental drugs available to the terminally ill.

They have to share more.

That’s the general opinion about the rich these days, and it seems to apply in special force when it comes to a certain kind of rich: the rich involved in medical innovation. Sometimes the issue is simply tax revenues from admired companies. When, for example, Pfizer recently announced its plans to move to London to reduce its tax bill, brothers Representative Sander Levin (D., Mich.), and Senator Carl Levin (also D., Mich.) promptly joined forces to back new legislation that would force Pfizer to share its revenues by blocking the companies’ move.

The New York Times branded Pfizer’s move a “tax dodge,” a way of suggesting Pfizer’s behavior is sleazy. But of course the loss of tax revenues isn’t all that the resenters resent. They resent the wealth of the rich scientists, who care for their families with “concierge doctors” in special clinics no one else knows about. The critics also resent the loss of intellectual capital that occurs when the rich decamp — and that, legitimately. As President Obama pointed out when he created the Brain Initiative to keep science and science money stateside: “We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead.” But what if rich pharma did share? And what if it shared not only patented drugs but also something far more precious, its innovating brain?

That exhilarating possibility is the essence of a new state-by-state drive involving experimental drugs, “The Right to Try.”

Herewith, the basics. For decades now the Food and Drug Administration has maintained an onerous and slow approval process that delays the debut of new drugs for fatal diseases, sometimes for years longer than the life span of the patients desperate to try them. Attorneys and scholars at the Goldwater Institute of Arizona have crafted legislation for the states that would allow terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs for cancer or degenerative neurological diseases earlier. These “Right to Try” bills are so scripted that they overcome the usual objection to delivery of such experimental drugs: safety. Under “Right to Try,” only drugs that have passed the crucial Phase 1 of FDA testing could be prescribed, thereby reducing the possibility of Thalidomide repeat. Second, only patients determined to have terminal cases would be eligible to purchase the drugs, making it harder to maintain that the drug will jeopardize their lives.