[caslon]

There are other countries, ones where it's legal to do medical experimentation upon any consenting party. Unsurprisingly, they don't create significant amounts of novel drugs. Why? Because the US system is more profitable, and, similar to how writing proprietary software is the most common way to earn a living as a software engineer, people like money.

Similar to platforms that claim to "democratize" a given hobby while at the end of the day being proprietary SaaS, people can claim as good of motives as they want, but at the end of the day, they want to make enough money to sit on their heels. The government strongly incentivizes drugs that are economically worthless without it.

The US system ensures that everyone gets paid. Laissez-faire drug development wouldn't. As better in theory as it may be, just like free software, in practice, you'd probably get fewer returns than the controlled system, just because people aren't altruistic, and nobody cares about niche diseases that doesn't have direct motive.

[echelon]

Not once did I propose changing the economic model. Only that we should give consenting, perhaps eager, terminal patients more options in participating in research and access to promising new drugs. It's unfair that there's a decade of waiting when lives are so quickly and pointlessly lost.

You're alive as a conscious participant in the universe just once, and then there's an infinity of nothing. You should have the option to try to keep that spark alive. If a chance, even fleeting, lies behind a glass door, that's cruel.

[catlikesshrimp]

If you did that, there would be a rush of (not necessarily) terminal patients signing up and mostly dieing anyways (hopefully of their terminal illnesses)

There would be, as expected, a large contingent of patients who were poor, alone and maybe not very terminal. The very same reason which lead to the creation of ethics committes