Right-to-try law
[6] As of August 2018[update], 41 states had enacted such laws: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
[18] On May 22, the Senate passed S.204, the Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act, and sent it to President Trump, who signed it on May 30, 2018, creating a uniform system for terminal patients seeking access to investigational treatments.
[20] 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".
[22] 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.
[2] 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.
The Advanced Integrative Medicine Science (AIMS) Institute in concert with the NPA filed a series of lawsuits seeking both the rescheduling of and expanded right to try access to psilocybin.
[31][32] Because the laws do not actually provide a right to receive experimental therapies, they could be considered toothless legislation that offers only false hope to dying people.
[38] Peter Temin wrote that "there is always a chance that any given drug will fail to cure a condition or will induce an adverse reaction," such as becoming sick, or sicker, or even dying.
"It's also important to remember that the real purpose of right-to-try laws is not to help patients, but to neuter the FDA's ability to regulate certain drugs, consistent with the source of this legislation."
Gorski further states that these laws "rest on a fantasy... of false hope ... that is rooted in libertarian politics ... that claims that deregulation is the cure for everything.
In February 2019, one of the namesakes of the federal law, Matt Bellina, who has ALS, said that he gained access to an experimental treatment through the drug company Brainstorm.
Harp, who states she was diagnosed with Stage 2 cancer and left housebound by a medical error one year after the bill passed, declared the legislation saved her life and she praised the Trump administration's fight for healthcare.
[51][52][53] Harp's claims were called into question by former FDA official Peter Lurie and Simon Fraser University professor of health sciences Jeremy Snyder.
[58] In February 2021, NeuroRX CEO Jonathan Javitt gave an interview indicating that its drug, aviptadil, had been used in over 500 patients with COVID-19, after the phase IIb/III trial failed to show significant benefit.
FDA rejected the application for Emergency Use Authorization,[59] prompting Javitt and NeuroRX to allow use of aviptadil as a possible "hail mary" drug for severely ill COVID-19 patients.
