Human flourishing includes coping with disease. In contemporary society, there is a great expectation that new drugs will continue to help patients with serious, often life-threatening illnesses. These expectations can exceed their demonstrated clinical benefits. This may reflect a failure to accept death and the reality of life after death. It is the task of regulatory agencies to provide guidelines for appropriate clinical studies to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of new experimental therapies. However, there is considerable pressure among certain groups in society to move the process of drug development faster and to make unproven, experimental drugs available to human subjects willing to try risky treatments of little or no proven benefit as their disease uncontrollably progresses toward death. This paper explores the expanded use of compassionate access protocols during drug development. While short-term risks to patients can be significant and the likelihood of efficacy very low in early phases of development, some groups continue to advocate for the right to access unproven drugs through both legislative and legal challenges to current policies. During the AIDS crises of the late 1980s, advocacy groups demanded and were granted the early availability of new investigational drugs being tested in AIDS patients. Within five months, 4800 patients were treated with free AZT outside of the context of clinical trials while far fewer patients were enrolled into such studies. While the FDA expanded its early access program for all patients with life-threatening or seriously debilitating illness in 1997 under continued political pressure, the agency remained troubled by the ethical and programmatic effects of these developments on new drug development. These effects will be analyzed, the short and long-term ethical implications will be presented, and the underlying basic beliefs about human flourishing driving different views will be discussed.