Stuff Your Faces with Experimental Drugs, Dying Arizonans!

This week Arizona joined
Michigan, Colorado, Louisiana, and Missouri when voters approved
a “right
to try” ballot initiative allowing terminally ill patients to
experimental drugs or medical treatments that have passed early
stages of clinical trials but are not yet formally approved by the
Food and Drug Administration.

It seems like it should be a no-brainer (and it was, passing
with
78 percent of the vote). As our Nick Gillespie has
noted: “You don’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian—though
it helps—to see the value in letting people with nothing left to
lose experiment on themselves. They may get a new lease on life.
The rest of us get meaningful information that may speed up the
development of the next great medical intervention.”

Nevertheless, The Washington Post has
sought out critics of this silly idea that dying people should
be able to try whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt
anybody but themselves:

Critics of the “Right to Try” laws say these unproven treatments
could hurt patients and the drug development process. Further, the
drugmakers don’t have to provide these treatments, and there are
reasons why they might not want to, including liability concerns
and a lack of supply early into a drug’s development. And insurers
don’t have to cover the drugs.

New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan has
criticized these laws as a “feel-good” effort that doesn’t
tackle the main problem — being able to afford these expensive
treatments. That goes for the families who want to pay for the
drugs, and the small companies funding the lengthy process of
getting a drug to market.

These are rather odd criticisms that seem to boil down to:
“Acknowledging that a terminally ill person has a right to try
experimental drugs doesn’t actually obligate anybody to
provide these drugs, therefore it’s no good.” The only choices to
them are apparently bans or mandates. The patients not able to get
these drugs at all now. It’s absurd to complain about equality of
access when the current outcome is that nobody gets any of it,
except for those who turn to the black market.
This is similar to complaining that selling birth control
medication over the counter rather than through a prescription
doesn’t really count as improving women’s access because women
would still have to pay for it.

In any event, Arizona voters obviously realized there was no
point of making perfect the enemy of the good when people were
dying. Perhaps more states will join in.