I am missing my blanket today. It may have been ratty, but I did love it so.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10839233/Right-To-Try-law-will-allow-Dallas-Buyers-Club-style-experimental-drugs.html
"Three US states to let terminally ill patients use medication before government approval"

That great, but will the drug companies? As I understand it if a person dies while taking a drug up for USDA approval the company has to prove beyond medical certainty that it wasnt their drug.

Many drug companies cant afford that risk.

@lujlp The medical R&D landscape remains a mess, so I think the benefits of this will remain artificially limited, but I see it as hopefully a tiny step in the right direction (and hopefully signifying a shift away from the general mentality of over-regulation, I don't know) .. got to take the small little bits of good news when they come along. The current regulatory environment has been strangling medical research to death for decades.

The article underplays the reality a bit. E.g.:

"This can be a slow process, with drugs put through many levels of testing over a number of years, leading some terminally ill patients and their families to argue that they should be allowed to try medicine which looks "promising" in early trials."

No, it should read "This can be a slow process, with drugs put through many levels of testing over a number of years, leading some terminally ill patients to die."

Actually, the article sounds absurdly apologetic. "This can be a slow process" ... seriously? No, not "can be" ... it IS a slow process. Even if researchers have literally found a cure and are sitting on it, in the lab, the FDA process takes on average 12 years before any patient can even so much as touch the new drug - and that's only if approved, a process so expensive and burdensome that it's only even attempted for a limited number of potential new drugs, and only for a limited percentage of diseases. So basically, if you are terminally ill, even if scientists ALREADY found the cure years ago, you WILL DIE anyway.

pets

"Who's crazy, you or me?" she said as she pulled a handgun from her vagina during an argument about space aliens.

Yes, a famous person is peripherally noted herein.