Despite his landmark decision last week to grant terminally ill patients the right to end their lives with a doctor’s help, Gov. Jerry Brown took a different course on Sunday and rejected Assembly Bill 159, the so-called “Right To Try” bill. The latter measure sought to allow terminally ill patients who have exhausted all other options to access experimental drugs, products or devices that have not yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Patients with life threatening conditions should be able to try experimental drugs, and the United States Food and Drug Administration’s compassionate use program allows this to happen,” Brown wrote in a signing message to lawmakers. “Before authorizing an alternative state pathway, we should give this federal expedited process a chance to work.”

But proponents of the measure — adopted so far in 24 states, most recently in Oregon in August — seemed stunned by the announcement.

Kurt Altman, the national policy adviser for the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which designed the law, said in a statement Sunday that Brown “has deprived Californians of the right to try to save their lives when their mortality hangs in the balance. We hope that the Legislature will work together in a bipartisan effort to override Governor Brown’s veto.”

Bay Area and Northern California residents counting on the bill’s passage were devastated by the news.

“I am very disappointed,” Mike DeBartoli, a former Sacramento firefighter suffering from ALS, said in a statement.

“This allows the FDA to retain control over my ability to save my own life while I still have time. Terminal patients in California now have no possibility of hope to prolong their lives.”

AB 159, authored by Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Whittier, and Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Temecula, was a lesser-known piece of legislation than the End of Life Option Act signed by Brown last Monday, but was still controversial.

The bill was opposed by the Association of Northern California Oncologists, who warned that providing unregulated treatments for people desperately trying to extend their lives takes advantage of their frailty.

Proponents, meanwhile, insisted that dying patients don’t have time to wait for the FDA to act to formally approve new therapies, or tolerate the red tape that can complicate the agency’s “expanded access” program, which provides experimental drugs to patients with life-threatening illnesses.

The FDA did not take a position on the legislation, but in February announced it is taking steps to simplify and more clearly communicate how physicians can request to get their patients experimental drugs.

In an interview with the Mercury News this summer, an FDA spokeswoman would not comment when asked if those new steps were a response to the growing wave of Right To Try legislation.

Contact Tracy Seipel at 408-920-5343. Follow her at Twitter.com/taseipel.