This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 17th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The right to try is an attempt by many state governments to allow terminally ill patients

access to drugs not yet approved by the FDA.

30 states have now enabled right to try, but the feds still stand in the way.

Starley Coleman is the VP for communications at the Goldwater Institute. We spoke today.

The Right to Try law is really the opposite of the Right to Die.

Right to Try is about giving people the opportunity to take an

investigational medication that is in a an FDA approved clinical trial when they

cannot qualify for that clinical trial

that they think will save their life or could help them live longer.

So these are drugs that are not approved by the FDA for prescription, but they are involved in a process in which

people have opted in to say, I want to be a subject of this drug, I have this particular ailment, I meet all these criteria, and you're

wanting to then extend that ability to people who are not participating in a clinical trial.

That's exactly right.

So right now the way that the drug approval process works,

it's a company has to go through a three trial phase.

So the phase one trial is a safety trial where the FDA gives people a dose to, or the, well, the FDA approves doctors to give people a dose to figure out if a drug is safe for human consumption. Phase two, they say, okay, the drug is safe,

we're gonna give it to more people,

and we're gonna test some other things.

We're gonna look at efficacy,

how it starts to interact with other drugs,

...