The Federal Right to Try Act of 2017—A Wrong Turn for Access to Investigational Drugs and the Path Forward

In 2017, President Trump said that “one thing that’s always disturbed”¹ him is that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) denies access to experimental drugs even “for a patient who’s terminal…[who] is not going to live more than four weeks [anyway.]”¹ Fueled by emotionally charged anecdotes recirculated by libertarian political activists, 38 states have passed Right to Try laws. In 2017, the US Senate approved a bill that would create a national law (Box).² As of December 2017, the US House of Representatives was considering the bill.