For Those Bent on Suicide, a Primer

Derek Humphry was ready with the small bottle of Seconal and codeine that a doctor friend had given him.

He mixed the lethal contents with coffee, went into the bedroom and handed the cup to his cancer-consumed wife, Jean. She gulped down the mixture and fell quickly asleep. About an hour later, the woman was dead.

“It gave her a comfort, a certainty,” explained Humphry. “So many deaths are in the middle of the night in a cancer ward.” He was not prosecuted in the 1975 death, which occurred in Britain.

Humphry, 54, is the co-founder of the West Los Angeles-based Hemlock Society and the author of a book--some call it a suicide manual--for the terminally ill.

Lethal Dosages Detailed

His book, “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” details lethal dosages of drugs and effective ways to take them. It’s the only book sold in this country that gives instructions on how to commit suicide.

“Let Me Die” has sold more than 36,000 copies since it was first published for members in 1981, Humphry said. It is on sale at more than 1,200 bookstores nationwide, said Fred Jordan, a spokesman for Grove Press of New York, which distributes the book.

An expanded public edition that retails for $10 went on sale last September.

“The public was so demanding of it that we came out with a public edition,” Humphry said. “We are the first organ in the U.S. to say that, many times, assisting a suicide is a decent thing and it ought to be lawful.”

Humphry says “Let Me Die” meets a growing demand for information on death and dying as the advancement of medical science keeps more terminally ill people alive tethered to life-support systems.

The issue of voluntary death was brought to public attention most recently by the case of William F. Bartling, a 70-year-old terminal patient who sued Glendale Adventist Hospital to have respirator tubes removed from his dying body. The Court of Appeal ruled that refusal of treatment is “a constitutionally guaranteed right.”

Membership Growing

The Bartling case and others have inflated the membership of three national right-to-die organizations, spokesmen say.

Humphry and his second wife, Ann, founded the nonprofit Hemlock Society in 1980 to educate the public on voluntary euthanasia and to eventually change the law to permit doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The Hemlock Society claims about 10,000 members.

Two other organizations, both based in New York, also report burgeoning membership.

The Society for the Right to Die, formerly the Euthanasia Society of America, was founded in 1938 and has about 130,000 members nationwide, Executive Director Alice Mehling said.

Concern for Dying, founded in 1967, claims between 80,000 and 100,000 members worldwide, its executive director A. J. Levinson, said.

Could Have Been Prosecuted

A journalist in England and later in the United States, Humphry wrote a book in 1978 telling the story of how he helped end his wife’s losing battle with breast and bone cancer.

In California, Humphry could have been prosecuted for what he calls the “rational suicide” or “self-deliverance” of his diseased wife. In Wiltshire, England, where the couple were living on that day in March, 1975, the local prosecutor elected not to press charges, even though it is also a crime in Britain to assist a suicide.

“People began asking, ‘Tell me what you used?’ ‘What about insurance problems?’ ‘Will I still go to heaven?’ ” Humphry said, explaining in part why he wrote “Let Me Die” and founded the Hemlock Society.

While Humphry, an atheist, talks about returning to journalism one day, he devotes all his time to running the Hemlock Society out of a house near his own along a tree-lined residential street far from Santa Monica.

The Hemlock Society publishes a quarterly newsletter and sponsors periodic conferences on death and dying. Annual membership fees are $20 a year, $15 for seniors.

“Let Me Die” contains the stories of terminally ill people, how they took their lives and the effect it had on their families.

Quick Lethality’

But it is the book’s candid explanations of the lethal use of drugs, some quick and painless and others not, that have proven most controversial. The book provides the layman with information that a doctor might provide if it were legal to assist a suicide.

“Darvon (propoxyphene) has gained a reputation for quick lethality in self-deliverance. Two grams are required,” the book says in a footnote. “Beware that Darvon is not a sleep agent so one should be included for peaceful self-deliverance.”

The book has made Humphry a radical among some of his right-to-die colleagues.

‘Book Open to Abuse’

The Concern for Dying and the Right to Die groups support the right of the terminally ill to cut off treatment, but both say publishing a book that educates the dying on how to take their lives goes too far.

Levinson said the mother of a young man came into her office one day distraught because her son had used “Let Me Die” to end his life. The man was not terminally ill, she said.

“The sale can increase the rate of suicide of the young and healthy and temporarily depressed,” Levinson said.

But Humphry says his book, as do a gun or a car, has potential for constructive use and abuse, and should not be judged by a different standard.

“Our book is open to abuse. We don’t deny it,” Humphry said. “But we think it does the greater good by helping mature adults who are trying to do it properly.”

Humphry says he doesn’t know how many people have used the instructions in his book--”I counted up to about 60 and lost count.” But he says he’s received telephone calls and letters of thanks for having published “Let Me Die,” although he would not make them available to a reporter for reasons of privacy.

The book keeps Humphry on the legal edge of assisting a suicide, a felony in California. But he says the First Amendment has kept him free of legal problems.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner had no comment on the Hemlock Society or its book. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Hyatt Seligman said the legality of publishing such a book has not been tested.

“It’s an issue of free speech (and state law),” he said. “That would be an interesting test case, I admit.” He said he suspects that the right to publish “Let Me Die” would be upheld in court.

In Santa Monica, the Phoenix Bookstore includes “Let Me Die” in a special section on death and dying. The section is one of the store’s most popular, owner Michael Goth said.

“(‘Let Me Die’) is a book that people are aware of, (but we’re not selling them like hot cakes,” said Goth, who added that he has never received any objections to marketing the book.

Humphry says that although more doctors are breaking the law and taking it upon themselves to provide the terminally ill with lethal dosages of drugs, the time is not right for a law sanctioning assisted-suicide.

“I’m devoting my life to it until such time as we can change the law, until doctors can help people to die,” Humphry said. “We shouldn’t have to do what I had to do to Jean.”