Derek Humphry

Derek Humphry (29 April 1930 – 2 January 2025) was a British and American journalist and author. He was a proponent of legal assisted suicide and the right to die. In 1980 he co-founded the Hemlock Society and in 2004 after the Society dissolved, he co-founded Final Exit Network. From 1988 to 1990 he was president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. As of 2007 he was the president of the Euthanasia Research & Guidance Organization (ERGO).

Humphry was the author of the related books Jean's Way (1978), The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia (1986), and Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying (1991).

Born in Bath to an English father and an Irish mother, Humphry was raised in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. His education was slender because of a broken home followed by World War II, when many English schools were in chaos, finally leaving at the age of 15, when he became a messenger boy for the Yorkshire Post. In a 30-year journalistic career Humphry worked and wrote for the Bristol Evening World, the Manchester Evening News, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times and, lastly, the Los Angeles Times.

In early 1990, Humphry married Gretchen Crocker, youngest daughter of an Oregon farming family. Humphry was a dual British and American citizen.

Humphry died of congestive heart failure, in Eugene, Oregon, on 2 January 2025, aged 94.

Humphry was an advisor to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies by virtue of his past presidency and in appreciation of his 26 years of involvement with that organization. From when it was founded in 2004, Humphry was an adviser to the Final Exit Network. After four members of the organization were accused in Georgia of assisting a suicide, he launched the Final Exit Liberty Fund which paid most of their legal costs.

In 2014, Humphry was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Federation of Right To Die Societies for "contributing so much, so long and so courageously to our right to a peaceful death." The award was presented by the organization's president, Faye Girsh, at its 20th international conference in Chicago in 2014. It was the first time this award had been made.

Humphry was newsletter editor for the World Federation of Right to Die Societies for a number of years.