Their efforts could benefit countless others in need of an end-of-life measure
When Erinn Baldeschwiler was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in March 2020, the then 48-year-old mother of two knew she wanted to seek treatment—but not just for the cancer itself. She also wanted something to address the emotional anguish that accompanies a terminal diagnosis. So she began investigating various therapies that might help her “make sense of everything and find peace,” as she put it at the time.
Baldeschwiler is not the first cancer patient to use Right to Try to access an investigational drug. But she and another cancer patient, Michal Bloom, do seem to be the first to seek to use the law for treatment with a Schedule I drug. Because of this, Aggarwal had to attempt to obtain some form of permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration to access and administer psilocybin.
The most frustrating part of the experience, Baldeschwiler says, is “knowing there are substances out there that can help but that they’re being taken off the table by some third-party agency that’s making my choice for me.” Kast also noted an unexpected side effect: LSD seemed to offer some relief from the existential distress that often accompanies a terminal illness. As he wrote in a 1964 study, “These patients displayed a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations, and talked freely about their impending death with an affect considered inappropriate in our western civilization, but most beneficial to their own psychic states.
Phase III trials—the necessary next step to gain FDA approval—typically cost millions of dollars, however, and Johnson is not aware of any such study currently being conducted using psychedelics to treat cancer distress. But the need is there, he says. Johnson has lost count of the number of patients and family members who have reached out to him in the hopes of accessing psilocybin therapy for conditions ranging from depression to nicotine addiction.
The Right to Try Act is an amendment to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act , however, and the 1970 Controlled Substances Act includes a provision clarifying that nothing in its text overrides the FDCA. “That’s an alphabet soup of acronyms, but at the end of the day, legal analysis would conclude that the Right to Try Act should not be thwarted or obstructed by the DEA,” Tucker says.
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