By 2018, 38 states had enacted "Right to Try" laws and more were considering such legislation.  These efforts catapulted this ethical question into national prominence and touches on some of the methods for ethical reasoning discussed in this chapter.

At the core of this debate is whether or not terminally ill patients have the ethical right to try therapy or experimental drugs that are still in the testing phase at pharmaceutical companies in the hope of stopping the spread of their disease or possibly saving their lives.  Patients were often naturally focused on the potential benefits of using these drugs, even if they were still under development and might be risky or ineffective.  An executive at The Goldwater Institute, a libertarian group supporting Right To Try laws, explained, "The goal is for terminally ill patients to have choice when it comes to end-stage disease.  Right To Try is something that will help terminally ill people all over the country."  These sentiments were echoed by Larry Kutt, a 65-year old man with an advanced blood cancer hoping to gain access to a therapy currently being tested by several pharmaceutical companies, who said, "It's my life and I want the chance to save it."

Critics have called efforts to create a federal Right to Try statute "a cruel shame," causing more harm than good by creating false hope.  Dr. David Gorski, a Michigan surgeon, argued that releasing unapproved therapies could cause untold pain in a person's final days, even hastening death.  Focusing on benefits-versus-harms perspective, Dr. Gorski explained, "They are far more likely to harm patients than to help them."

The formal legal position in the United States was based on a 2007 court ruling that stated patients did not ahve a constinutional right to medicines that were not federally approved.  The Food and Drug Administration had a program under which terminally ill patients, who had exchausted their treatment options, could try to obtain therapies that had passed at least the first of three FDA investigation phases.  But, the law did not require pharmaceutical compneies to provide the treatment, nor did it mandate that insurance companies cover these therapies.  Alos, the law did allow insurance companies to deny coverage to paitients while they use drugs under investigation.  In 2015, Johnson & Johnson created a panel of bioethicists to study patients' requests for potentially lifesaving medicines and amke recommendations to the pharmaceutical firm.

 

Sources: "Patients Seek 'Right to Try' New Drugs," The New York Times, January 10, 2015, www.nytimes.com; "Federal 'Right to Try' Bill: Wrong on the Law, and Wrong for Patients," The Hill, June 28, 2016, thehill.com; and , "U.S. Senator Introduces a 'Right to Try' Bill for Desperate Patients," Stat, May 10, 2016, www.statnews.com.

 

Required: What ethical obligations do pharmaceutical companies have to their stakeholders?  How can businesses balance these responsibilities with shareholder responsibilties?  Please discuss an example where a pharmaceutical company put profits over people or people over profits (not just including "Right to Try" drugs, but any time of drug).