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IPFS News Link • Events: America

The Right to Try to Live

• https://www.libertarianinstitute.org

The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need by Darcy Olsen (HarperCollins, 2015); 311 pages.

The highly acclaimed 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club told the story of Ron Woodroof, who tried desperately to get drugs that might help arrest Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome back in the mid 1980s. While there were some drugs thought to help in treating the disease, none had been approved for use in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration. Woodroof and his fellow AIDS sufferers knew that no drug was guaranteed to work, but they wanted to be allowed to try those that might save their lives. The FDA, however, did all it could to block the group from obtaining and distributing the drugs.

In the 1980s, FDA officials held the view that they alone were entitled to decide what medications Americans would be allowed to use. How much has that mindset changed over the subsequent decades? Hardly at all, argues Darcy Olsen in her book The Right to Try. Olsen, president of the Goldwater Institute, makes two strong arguments: first, that the federal bureaucracy is an immense obstacle to Americans who want to obtain drugs that might save their lives, and second, that a partial remedy for that obstructionism is available in state "Right to Try" statutes.


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