NC General Assembly speaks as one with law to help the terminally ill

Nothing in recent memory has passed both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly with nary a “no” vote.

But now something has, and it’s a good bill.

House Bill 652 would allow patients diagnosed as terminally ill to try drugs or treatments that have not been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. It’s called a “right to try” law.

The treatments would have to have passed the first of three FDA trial phases, the one that determines that a drug is not toxic.

So many terminally ill patients are frustrated when, in the course of their treatment, they hear of some ground-breaking new drug rumored to have been successful in foreign countries where drug regulations are perhaps not as stringent as they are in the United States. At least, that may be their perception. But they can’t get the drug because of FDA requirements.

To be sure, those rules exist to ensure that patients are taking worthwhile medication that is going to help them or has a chance of helping them, and isn’t something that will do them more harm than good. In other words, criticism of the FDA is sometimes excessive.

That said, it does take as much as 15 years to get a new drug approved, and it can cost a drugmaker $1 billion. That’s from the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based think tank that supports the type of legislation that passed North Carolina’s General Assembly. (Arizona was the home of the late and legendary Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater.)

Under North Carolina’s measure, terminally ill patients would have to have a recommendation to allow them to try an experimental treatment from their doctors, who would certify that they’d reviewed other FDA-approved treatments.

Obviously, a physician is sworn to do no harm, but it’s hard to see how letting a person who has been diagnosed as terminally ill try something that might give him or her hope is doing harm. For those who have been told their days are numbered, hope is important. In fact, it is all they have.

This story was originally published June 28, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "NC General Assembly speaks as one with law to help the terminally ill."