On Monday, the Montana State Senate unanimously passed a “right to try” bill, which would allow terminally ill patients to ignore federal restrictions on experimental treatments and drugs. Too often, patients who cannot be cured by conventional treatment are denied the ability to try new options thanks to onerous regulations by the FDA.
“Right to try” laws’ free-market principles were dramatized in the 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club, which starred Matthew McConaughey as an AIDS patient who smuggles non-FDA approved drugs into the country in the 1980s. Rare’s Jack Hunter noted that McConaughey character’s “service improves AIDS victims’ lives while the government’s primary concern is to insist on its own authority. For the state, its legitimacy comes before the sick and dying.”
Montana is one of 22 states considering “right to try” legislation this year, and five states—Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri—already have similar laws on the books. “This is all patient-driven,” explains Indiana State Rep. Wes Culver,, “because we have heard stories of people who are dying and there’s drugs out there that could possibly save them and they’re not allowed to take them and they’re like, ‘What have I got to lose?’”
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