This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 26, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Two dozen states have crafted laws that allow the terminally ill to try drugs not yet approved by the FDA.

But many difficulties remain in granting people throughout the US the so-called right to try.

Christina Sandifers vice president for policy at the Goldwater Institute, we spoke today.

Governor Jerry Brown, within a few weeks, signed into law a, essentially a death with dignity piece of legislation to allow people to use physicians to assist

them in ending their lives and vetoed legislation that would have allowed people to try non-FDA approved medications

solely for those people who were terminally ill.

And that just is sort of a weird juxtaposition where you can die but you can't

take risks in order to live. Yeah that's right so in California we have the bizarre

situation where you literally have the right to die, but you do not have the right to try to save your own life.

And we just, we think that's absolutely unacceptable.

A terminally ill patient should be able to try every means available to him to be able to try to

save his own life.

But in California that's just not the case.

So what is the FDA process right now for getting a drug to wide availability in the

prescription drug market.

Over the last half century, the FDA process has become incredibly cumbersome.

It takes on average about a decade and a billion dollars for a potentially life-saving drug to get approved for market.

And when you're a terminally ill patient who has only say a few months, maybe in a few weeks to live you just can't wait 10 years

for a treatment to become available to you. So how many states have decided this is

essentially unacceptable and we would like very sick people to be able to make

...