A Horrific Notion
This entry was posted on 8/8/2007 5:24 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that terminally ill patients have no right to experimental drugs that might benefit them.
This is sad on so many levels. Aren't we supposed to be looking after the lowliest members of our society? Shouldn't we be doing all we can for terminally ill patients (with their consent), even if we don't have the highest degree of certainty what the outcome will be? (What's the worst that could happen? They're already going to die.) Isn't the Ninth Amendment supposed to protect a person's right to privacy? If the Ninth doesn't cover this, then what exactly does it cover? What kind of privacies are left to us?
I'm a big advocate for freedom of privacy, but even without that, this is absolutely appalling. How can you tell terminally ill people that the one alternative they thought they had can't be used? How do you look a cancer patient in the eye and tell them that you're condemning them to death, because an option that might have been able to slow or even halt the disease they're dying from isn't approved by the FDA, despite the fact that it has shown promising results in clinical trials? I think each and every justice who ruled in the majority should have to tell at least one terminally ill person, face to face, that they are going to have to die because it might infringe on the government's war on illegal drugs. I don't think it would change anything about the court as it stands now, but it would at least give us a measure of the humanity of the current justices. (I guess since decency isn't written into the Constitution, they don't have to abide by it, either.) And quoting Raich in the decision was absolutely spineless - marijuana (a substance the federal government has declared illegal) has nothing to do with prescription medications (which have legal sanction).
This immediately reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my co-workers a couple of weeks ago. He used to work for a pharmaceutical company that was developing a medication to combat Alzheimer's disease. The clinical trials had shown amazing results, and they already had warehouse space set aside for the product release. At the last minute, the FDA told them they weren't allowed to release the drug. Why? Because approximately 1 in 1000 patients developed lethal liver damage, and died within 2 or 3 years.
Keep in mind, I'm not talking about people with early-stage Alzheimer's; the study volunteers had severe, advanced Alzheimer's - to the point where they couldn't remember their families, or their friends, or virtually anything at all. He said that the return these people made was nothing short of miraculous. As he put it, "People who had lost so much of their mental faculties now had them returned - they were able to remember things they thought were gone forever. They were people their families recognized again."
I told him that I was fairly sure that if patients and their families were told of the possibility of catastrophic liver failure, that they would probably still volunteer to take the medication; at least, most of them would prefer a couple of short, but normal, years to many more years spent in the state they had so recently been in. He looked me in the eyes with one of the saddest expressions I have ever seen and said, "All of them."
That's what we're taking away from people: Not just hope, but the ability to make decisions about your personal health. The implications of this decision terrify me.
