This policy enhances the role of drug reps and advertising, at the cost of evidence-based medicine  By allowing anyone who is critically ill to use experimental drugs you enhance the already dubious role of drug company reps: especially in the USA, (where doctors do not operate under the NHS guidance found in the UK), there is already a problem of patterns of prescription being altered by the techniques of drug reps, rather than by evidence1. Where drugs are for sale before they have completed testing, there is even less evidence available, and therefore less ability for physicians to contest the claims of either reps or their own patients (who may have heard of the drug during their own research). Hence you magnify the problem of potentially ineffective of even harmful prescription.  1 Harris, Gwyn, ‘Pharmaceutical representatives do influence physician behaviour’, Family Practice, Vol.26 2009, pp.169-70,