This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 18, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For people who want to assert control over their own health care in the US,

options are limited.

If you want to try therapies that have yet to be

approved, you'd better be wealthy enough to travel overseas. At the State Policy Network

annual meeting in Utah, Naomi Lopez-Bowman of the Goldwater Institute discussed with me possible future

options for people who want to experiment with their own health.

Years ago Charles Murray wrote what it means to be a libertarian, a personal interpretation,

and one of the ideas that he presents in that book is the idea that you should be able to essentially

consume whatever product or supplement or drug that you want.

And the only thing that the provider of that product needs to put on it is the FDA hadn't approved this and you're you

know you're welcome to try it but the FDA has not approved this even if it's in

the process of going through some sort of trial that this provides a bit of a

pressure valve for people who would like to take more control of their own decisions and either suffer the consequences or reap the benefits.

So with respect to drugs in the United States right now, if somebody is seeking approval nobody gets it.

Really, I mean, so whenever you take a look at where we are in terms of information,

where we are in terms of regulation, there really is an inability for regulators to keep pace with innovations

that are happening, information being shared.

And in fact, these efforts often fail when you take a look at for example CRISPR which is gene

editing there are a lot of do-what-yourselfers out there there are other people

doing their own immunology it really is we're really living in a different era

...