The state of Colorado has signed a law giving terminally ill patients the right to use experimental drugs. Governor John Hickenlooper signed the 'Right to Try' bill into law in Fort Collins.
It’s a proposal being advanced in several states by patient
advocates who are frustrated by the amount of time the federal
approval process takes for experimental drugs in the pipeline.
Missouri and Louisiana also passed similar legislation recently.
The bill's co-sponsor, Democratic State Rep. Joann Ginall, was
absent from the signing ceremony in order to tend to her older
brother, Tom, who is suffering from a rare blood cancer. “For
people who are facing death and have one last hope, they should
have a choice to try every possible drug,” Ginall stated.
The new law allows patients and doctors to work together to
secure experimental treatments with the permission of a
pharmaceutical company. Insurance companies are not required to
pay for the treatment, and drug manufacturers can choose whether
to charge for the medication or to provide it to the patient free
of charge.
The bill also won support from state Senator Irene Aguilar, who
is also a physician. “When you’re terminal and there’s a drug
out there that might help you, it can seem that the obstacles to
get that drug are insurmountable.”
Aguilar dubbed the measure the 'Dallas Buyers Club' bill, after
the movie about a terminally ill AIDS patient who managed to
smuggle medicines from abroad, due to them not being legal in the
US.
Opponents of the piece of legislation say it is an ill-advised
effort that circumvents federal law while also undermining the
drug development process, and threatens to harm more people than
it helps by providing access to medications that haven’t been
proven safe and effective.
The law doesn’t require drug companies to provide any drug
outside federal parameters, and there’s no indication that
pharmaceutical companies will do so. Dr. David Gorski, a surgical
oncologist who is also editor of the blog Science Based Medicine,
says the ‘right to try’ proposals are simply feel-good measures
that won't help many patients.
"These proposals are built on this fantasy that there are all
these patients out there that are going to be saved if they could
just get access to the medicine," he said. "In reality,
the patients that might be helped are very few, while the number
of patients who could be hurt by something like this are
many."