Derek Humphry, Pivotal Figure in Right-to-Die Movement, (1930-2025)

 Here's the NYT obit:

Derek Humphry, Pivotal Figure in Right-to-Die Movement, Dies at 94
His own experience assisting his terminally ill wife in ending her life set him on a path to founding the Hemlock Society and writing a best-selling guide.  By Michael S. Rosenwald, NYT,  Jan. 24, 2025

"Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and to publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94.

His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family

...

"In August 1980, he and his [second] wife rented the Los Angeles Press Club to announce the establishment of the Hemlock Society, which they ran out of the garage of their home in Santa Monica.

"The organization grew quickly. In 1981, it issued “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” a guide to medicines and dosages for inducing “peaceful self-deliverance.” The group also lobbied state legislatures to enact laws making assisted suicide legal. In 1990, the Hemlock Society moved to Eugene. By then it had more than 30,000 members, but the right-to-die conversation hadn’t yet reached most dinner tables in America. 

"That changed spectacularly in 1991, after Mr. Humphry published “Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying.” The book was a 192-page step-by-step guide that, in addition to explaining suicide methods, provided Miss Manners-like tips for exiting gracefully.

...

"“Final Exit” quickly shot to No. 1 in the hardcover advice category of The New York Times’s best-seller list.

“That is an indication of how large the issue of euthanasia looms in our society now,” the bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan told The Times in 1991. “It is frightening and disturbing, and that kind of sales figure is a shot across the bow. It is the loudest statement of protest of how medicine is dealing with terminal illness and dying.”

"Reactions to “Final Exit” were generally divided along ideological lines. Conservatives blasted it.

“What can one say about this new ‘book’? In one word: evil,” the University of Chicago bioethicist Leon R. Kass wrote in Commentary magazine, calling Mr. Humphry “the Lord High Executioner.”  

...

"But progressives embraced the book, even as public health experts expressed concern that the methods it laid out could be used by depressed people who weren’t terminally ill. "