&gt; A patient with a seriously life-threatening disease like lung cancer is perhaps more willing to gamble on a risky drug in pursuit of a cure, while someone with a disease that has a high survival rate such as diabetes presumably cares more about avoiding adverse side effects.<p>If he&#x27;s more willing to gamble, then why not <i>just let him do it</i>? The FDA&#x27;s job should be to enforce truth-in-labelling (which means drugs with no beneficial use should be labelled as such, and those with horrible side effects should be labelled as such), and patients working in concert with their physicians should determine which drugs to take.<p>For this to work, we may need to limit the ability of drugs to be advertised. I&#x27;m okay with limiting the civil right to free speech of pharmaceutical companies in order to respect the fundamental human right to ingest whatever one wishes of patients.