Lloyd Morrison posted on his Facebook page about a heartwarming, inspiring, but puzzling story from The Australian. It reports on young mother Natalie's near miraculous response to an experimental German drug treatment for leukemia. Natalie's fiance Andy arranged for her to qualify to become part of the study.The headline suggests it could cause a rewrite of "treatment rules".

But the report does not touch on the 'rules'. The law around drug experimentation is inexcusable.  I do not understand why people have accepted the huge intrusion on freedom that lies in prohibiting access to new drugs until they've been through years of testing.

For Natalie death was considered imminent and near certain. She and her fiance were willing to pay for treatment. Why should she have to qualify for a study, gain the privilege of being part of an experiment, to have this treatment.

The Australian does not explain. Perhaps in this case it was unavoidable, perhaps the drug is rare, and the team who can administer it are specialists. But it seems that often people are denied the chance to buy treatment simply because drugs are not proven. When the alternative is death, why should that be of the slightest interest to the law? The huge cost and delay of getting drugs through the registration process may be condemning thousands of Natalies who do not have husbands as effective and persistent as Andy Fairclough.

Why should not people be free to consent to any treatment they want, at any stage of testing, if their alternative is death anyway. The law can not compel them to have treatment, no one is any longer punished for attempting suicide, so what is the moral foundation for banning people at death's door from buying and using any drug they want?

This is not a challenge to the role of Pharmac – in my opinion they do a great job for New Zealand. Their effciciency masks the consequences of our continuing decline in relative wealth. It enables us to keep access for most of the population to drugs that would otherwise be drifting out of our reach.  Nor is this a demand for more to be spent on health.  I commend Tony Ryall's lifting of what I'm told was Annette King's edict banning public hospital involvement in administering drugs brought in privately by desperate families.

I'm thinking more about a human rights challenge to the incredible bureacracy around health experimentation, and the time-wasting "ehtics" committees, at least so far as they affect those with a poor prognisis. What about allowing New Zealand to become a destination for medical tourists, looking for treatments the FDA or the Australian government will not allow them to have. We could supervise for integrity, and fully informed consent. Leaving it to the individuals and their families is consistent with the right to suicide (and our freedom to drink or eat or motorcycle or mountain climb ourselves to death).

I would not hold my breath for anything useful out of our two bodies with the Orwellian false names – the "Human Rights Commission", and the "Human Rights Review Tribunal", but it would be interesting nevertheless to see if and  how they would rationalise away the right of people to seek out treatment they believed in, when condemned to die, using their own resources, without going overseas. It is paradoxical that we have less freedom than countries without the lip-service law we have, who have not given such enormous powers to their medico-legal establishment.

Perhaps reasonable arguments could be drawn from our Human Rights Act prohibition on discrimination againt those with disability. Maybe it could be founded on sections 8, 10 and 11 of NZBORA. It could be useful to run such a case through to our Supreme Court.

I think Canada has the "green eye" policy of prohibition writ in law. I should check, but I think t is simply illegal to use your own money to get medical services outside the state system. I must see how the priests on the Canadian Supreme Court have rationalised their rulers' usurpation of the individual right to do whatever one wishes that does not harm others, to say nothing of the right "not to be deprived of life except on such grounds as are established by law and consistent with the principles of fundamental justice" (as it is expressed in section 8 of NZBORA).