AIDS Adding to Ranks of Hemlock Society, Death-With-Dignity Lobby : Euthanasia: A journalist-turned-activist leads the movement to legalize suicide assistance for the dying. It all started when he lost his wife.

In the early years of Derek Humphry’s campaign to legalize euthanasia for the terminally ill, his National Hemlock Society was, by his own admission, an “elderly ladies’ organization.” AIDS has changed that.

In recent years, Humphry’s group has been joined by scores of young men afflicted with AIDS, all of whom--unless a cure is found --will die the kind of slow, agonizing death that often drives people to kill themselves.

Humphry says he does not know how many members have AIDS. He says there are other reasons for the group’s growth, but the disease has played a role.

“It’s shown young people that they can die of a terminal illness as well as elderly people,” Humphry said. “It’s sad, but true.

“We used to be an elderly ladies’ organization,” he said. “I would speak at meetings and it would be a sea of gray heads.”

Humphry, 60, learned firsthand 15 years ago that fatal disease can strike people in the prime of life when he helped his wife, then 42, kill herself after a long battle with cancer. He wrote a book about it, and within five years founded the Hemlock Society to campaign for legal euthanasia and distribute information on suicide.

In June, one member, Janet Adkins, sparked a nationwide debate when she used a “suicide machine” to escape further suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Adkins traveled from her home in Portland, Ore., to Michigan, where she climbed into a Volkswagen bus and injected herself with lethal chemicals by pushing a button on the machine, which was invented by a retired physician.

Humphry said that Adkins’ case demonstrated the need for legal standards.

“She had to go 2,300 miles to die in a camper in a parking lot,” he said. “That’s not my idea of death with dignity.”

Humphry’s idea is to let doctors help people commit suicide.

The group’s model proposal: A patient with a fatal illness could ask a doctor for lethal chemicals that could be drunk or injected. If two doctors certified that the patient was dying and in pain, such chemicals could be legally supplied. Any doctor would be free to refuse to participate.

A similar system, operating in Holland for 10 years, was the model for the Hemlock Society’s plan, Humphry said. He said it is a crime to assist a suicide in 22 states, and the rest often use other laws to prosecute people who help someone take his or her life.

In Washington state, petitions are being circulated in favor of legalizing the Hemlock Society’s program. With enough signatures by January, the bill will go to the Legislature. Lawmakers can then enact the proposal or put the issue to a referendum.

Humphry said that such a law would allow precisely the kind of assistance that Adkins received from Dr. Jack Kevorkian, whose “suicide machine” she used.

“Washington is where the action is,” Humphry said. “They’re trying to pass into law what Kevorkian did.”

The Hemlock Society, named for the poison drunk by Socrates--is the only organization in the United States campaigning to legalize suicide assistance, Humphry said.

Other groups want to allow terminally ill patients to refuse life-support machines, but Humphry considers that insufficient. He said that many cancer patients, for example, are not hooked up to machines as they die.

“There’s no plug to pull,” he said.

Humphry predicted that euthanasia will be legal within five years in many countries and on the West Coast, where the idea has the most support.

“The institutional churches (which mostly oppose euthanasia) don’t have the clout that they do on the East Coast and in the Midwest,” he said. “People on the West Coast are more freewheeling and freethinking.”

Within 10 years, he said, euthanasia will be legal throughout much of the world.

The situation is a far cry from 1980, when the Hemlock Society got its start in Los Angeles. It had one other member. It now has 33,500 dues-paying members, has published nine books, has about a dozen employees and, last year, had a budget of $700,000.

The society’s recent growth is due in part to the ever-increasing ability of medical technology to keep suffering people alive, Humphry said.

“People have realized the double-edged sword of modern technology,” he said. “That’s the springboard of our growth.”

Their experiences with modern medicine make young doctors more likely than their older colleagues to support euthanasia, Humphry said.

In 1975, Humphry’s wife, Jean, asked him to help her kill herself. Three years before, she had learned she had cancer. It quickly progressed to a terminal, and she told him she could not continue with the pain and suffering.

“I had no views on euthanasia,” recalled Humphry, who was then living in his native England and working as a reporter for the Times of London. “I’m not sure I even knew the meaning of the word.”

He agreed to help his wife, and a doctor friend gave him a lethal potion. On March 29, 1975, Jean Humphry asked her husband to give her the drink.

They talked for several hours, and then he mixed the poison into a cup of coffee. His wife passed out quickly and was dead 50 minutes later.

Humphry says that during those 50 minutes, he never considered calling an ambulance. In “Jean’s Way,” his book about the experience, he wrote that he had resolved to smother her with pillows if the poisoning failed.

“I never backed off. She was so determined, so cool, and I knew she was right,” he said in an interview. “It was just something two people did because one of them was in a jam.”

When the book, written with his second wife, was published in the United States in 1978, Humphry decided to move to America.

He first worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, then abandoned journalism to found the Hemlock Society. The group moved to Eugene eight years later.

Humphry acknowledged that the unusual nature of his cause has brought him into contact with some odd proposals.

For example, Dr. Kevorkian--the inventor--approached him several years ago to suggest a program of voluntary euthanasia for convicts facing lengthy sentences. Humphry begged off, saying that he was interested only in helping the terminally ill.

Another doctor in California proposed a “suicide ship” that would cruise off the West Coast in international waters. Again, Humphry said no.

“Hemlock is a very determined, single-issue organization,” he said.

As for his own death, Humphry said he will decide that later.

“If my dying is peaceful and painless and dignified, I won’t do anything about it,” he said. “If my dying is painful and disgusting, I’ll tell my family what I’m going to do, and within a day or two I’ll have taken my life. I’ll see how the cookie crumbles.”