Montana’s new “right to try”: Opening the door to profit from unproven drugs | Science-Based Medicine

As much as I rail against the antivax component of MAHA, the “health freedom” component is arguably more dangerous to science-based medicine, and at the vanguard of “health freedom” is right-to-try. While some of the anti-regulation libertarians who falsely believe that the FDA is killing people through bureaucratic slowness and inefficiency and think that the “free market” can guarantee drug safety and efficacy might really believe that right-to-try is about protecting patients, I argue that it is more about taking as much power away from the FDA as possible and taking us back to the 19th century in terms of drug science, safety, and efficacy. Worse, now that the current administration is in power, right-to-try advocates might just succeed. At the very minimum, as far as drug regulation goes, Montana is looking to be a great place to set up a Hallwang-style clinic in which conventional medicine is mixed with unproven experimental therapeutics and alternative medicine.