Right-to-try law

Right-to-try laws are U.S. state laws that were created to let terminally ill patients try experimental therapies (drugs, biologics, devices) that have completed Phase 1 testing but have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These laws' value has been called into question on multiple grounds, including the fact that they do not require pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide the therapies that patients are seeking.

In May 2014, Colorado became the first state to pass a right-to-try law. As of May 2017^[update], 37 states have enacted such laws: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Right-to-try laws are immensely popular with both citizens and legislators, as they are viewed as offering terminally ill patients one last chance at saving their lives. The chief advocate of right-to-try laws is the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Arizona, which created the legislation template on which the state laws are modeled. Kurt Altman, national policy adviser for the Institute, has said that right-to-try laws return control of medical decisions "back to a local level". Other proponents include patients and their families, as well as patient advocate groups. Supporters of these laws sometimes describe them as "Dallas Buyers Club" bills, a reference to a movie about an American man with AIDS who smuggled unapproved treatments from foreign countries to fellow patients. Some have likened the efforts of terminally ill patients to procure unapproved drugs in development to those of ACT-UP and other AIDS organizations of the 1980s.

One ethical argument for the right to try unapproved treatments is that if patients have the right to die through physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, they should also be afforded the right to try. Some argue that the right to die devalues the lives of people with terminal illness and tacitly encourages them to take their own lives, rather than advocate for them to seek potentially life-saving treatment.

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