The FDA Needs to Change Drug Trial Rules

Before a drug comes to market, it must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. If you have a disease that the drug is meant to treat, you are not allowed to take it unless you are in a study or the drug has already been approved. But why are we not allowed to take the drugs before then? Yes, I know, safety, but if I have the choice between a potential cure and certain death, I’ll take the potential cure any day.

Milton Friedman was an opponent of the FDA because of this very issue. He even went so far as to say that many people have died needlessly as a result of this policy. So why do we still have it? It really just seems that people have a fixation on safety; that people cannot make decisions for themselves. This is nonsense. If people know the risks, what is wrong with allowing them to agree to this? It should be advertised as untested and that the risks are unknown, but people should be allowed to try it. Besides the fact that it would save many lives, it would also be good for research. There are many drugs that have been pulled from the market because even though it passed the drug trials, problems were discovered after. So why not try to get as much information as we can as soon as we can get it so that people will know the risks sooner?

The only reason that we still have this process is to make the FDA seem more legitimate and to appease those who are too scared to make decisions for themselves. There is no good rationale behind it. There are many drugs that are in the pipeline right now that go untested because they are still going through these long drug trials. It is time to end this unnecessary process and bring the newest scientific discoveries to the market before more people die needlessly.