In celebration of Beacon’s 20th Anniversary, Beacon President and CEO Justin Owen wrote a book called Modern Davids: Celebrating 20 Years with 20 Stories of Everyday Tennesseans Fighting Big Government. We will be sharing an excerpt from the book each month to tell you more about our heroes. The book is out now! You can secure your copy by clicking here.
Wilcox grew up singing. As she says, “I think I could sing before I could say any words.” So she was devastated when she realized she may never be able to sing again after her doctor informed her that she had Stage IV colon and thyroid cancer.
Astonishingly, there were drugs available that could help save her life, but they were not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Drugs often take decades and billions of dollars of testing and trials before they can be accessed by patients. Even the FDA’s streamlined process for terminally ill patients to access live-saving medication could take a doctor six months’ worth of paperwork and waiting, time many patients simply don’t have.
Thanks to the Goldwater Institute (Arizona’s version of Beacon), a new policy called “right to try” could change all that. The idea was to protect doctors’ ability to administer medicine or treatments to terminally ill patients as long as the drugs had been deemed safe by the FDA, even if they were not yet available on the market. Colorado became the first state to pass a right to try law in 2014.
A year later, we partnered with Amanda to advocate for her own right to try experimental medicine to treat her disease. Her fight against government was nothing compared to her heroic fight against her horrible cancer. But thanks to her, the Tennessee legislature passed the legislation, and even named it the Phil Timp-Amanda Wilcox Right to Try Act in appreciation for her compelling advocacy.
After a majority of states passed similar legislation over the next three years, Congress finally acted with a federal right to try law. Now, the FDA application process that once took six months takes just forty-five minutes to complete, and patients all across America have the right to try medicine that could save their lives. This proves that states can put pressure on the federal government to act, and how just a few individuals like Amanda can have an outsized national impact.