Major decision handed down today:
"The lawsuit argued that the FDA's policy to withhold early-stage experimental drugs from terminally ill patients violates the Constitution by depriving them of life and liberty without due process. Without any comment or recorded dissent, the justices refused to review a U.S. appeals court ruling in August that there is no fundamental constitutional right of access to experimental drugs for the terminally ill."
Which sounds right to me. That doesn't mean that the patients in this case DON'T deserve to access to the experimental drugs they seek. Maybe they do. But the "constitutional right" they claimed to exist, in fact doesn't. Clearly the founders had no intention of creating such a right. They didn't know such drugs would ever exist. What the patients in this case should do is not to seek imaginary constitutional rights. Rather, they should go to their legislators and get them to pass legislation that would get them what they seek, thus allowing the legislature to examine and debate this issue. Fundamental: that's what strict constructionism and seeking the original intent of the framers is all about. It doesn't mean denying everybody everything. Rather, it means having important debated openly, not decided through the sudden finding of "rights" by unelected judges.
