(Photo by Pöllö; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

At the height of the AIDS epidemic 25 years ago, only those lucky or well-connected enough had the opportunity to enroll in clinical trials that offered them hope for treatment, when they otherwise had none. But the widespread, unrelenting outcries of AIDS activists like myself spurred the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to offer patients “expanded access programs” for a few drugs that were nearing formal approval and provided hope to AIDS patients.

Today, the voices of patients and advocates are needed again to give the terminally ill the chance to try to save their own lives.

Recently, the “Right to Try” bill unanimously passed the Senate with full bipartisan support. Now it awaits action in the House as S. 204. The bill codifies a right AIDS patients first demanded a quarter-century ago. It allows people with terminal illnesses access to investigational treatments that meet FDA safety standards but have not completed the arduous efficacy trials FDA requires for marketing. While 38 states have passed Right to Try bills, federal legislation is still needed to protect doctors from prosecution by FDA.

Other countries have more flexible regulatory policies. France’s lenient regulations allow 12,000 French patients access to investigational drugs every year. In the U.S., with five times the population of France, fewer than 2,000 per year make it through FDA’s complicated, lengthy, and expensive application process. A terminal patient is 30 times more likely to get investigational drugs in France than in the U.S. These figures belie FDA claims that the agency meets all needs for early access.

Current FDA application procedures create almost insurmountable obstacles for Americans trying to access investigational treatments. In desperation, many are driven to seek treatment abroad or try underground drugs that are useless, fraudulent or dangerous.

We’ve seen this before. While FDA did reluctantly begin offering expanded access programs during the AIDS epidemic, FDA’s foot-dragging spurred the growth of an AIDS drug underground that ensnared thousands of hapless patients. The award-winning film “Dallas Buyers Club” dramatizes patients’ desperation and heroism, though it downplays the dangers of underground drugs. When stories in the San Francisco papers forced FDA to test a knockoff of the drug DDC, its dosages were found to be inaccurate, which made them dangerous. Some samples contained no actual DDC, while others were adulterated. An activist friend who took another underground drug, trichosanthin, went into anaphylactic shock, almost killing him. Many of the sick grew worse experimenting with underground panaceas. FDA turned a blind eye to the buyers clubs because they provided a convenient safety valve that reduced community pressure on FDA to speed approval of legitimate pharmaceuticals.

Under mounting duress, the agency did grant early approval to protease-based antiretroviral drug cocktails. These quickly reduced AIDS deaths from more than 48,000 in 1995 to about 35,000 in 1996. By 2015 deaths had dropped to about 6,700. It is almost forgotten that AIDS activists and their doctors dragged FDA kicking and screaming into early approval. FDA proposed instead a scheme for “large simple trials” that could have delayed full approval several years. Such a delay would have cost tens of thousands of lives. Ironically, the AIDS activists who targeted FDA saved the agency from a catastrophic mistake it was dead set on making.

The dilemma of Americans denied access to investigational drugs is not peculiar to AIDS patients of a bygone era. Today’s patients with terminal cancer and rare diseases too often find they must leave America to try the newest treatments, if they can afford to leave. Even the prominent and highly educated are driven to try ineffective or dangerous remedies, as was the revered Coretta Scott King before her 2006 death in Mexico. America needs to make the right to try investigational drugs a civil right for all dying patients. Indeed, the right to try is part and parcel of the right to life.

FDA’s mission to protect public health would have been better served by respecting the rights of AIDS patients. These patients were at death’s door and only wanted a chance to live. Giving them that chance would have reduced the very real perils of underground knockoff drugs. But the FDA bureaucracy prioritized guarding its regulatory turf above respecting patients’ freedom to choose. Freedom won that time thanks to AIDS activists’ determination, but its victory is not assured. To ensure patient freedom now and in the future, Congress must pass Right to Try.

James Driscoll, Ph.D., a longtime AIDS activist, was an early leader in the fight for access to AIDS drugs. He is currently Healthcare Advisor to Liberty Education Fund.