Hemlock Society
The Hemlock Society (sometimes called Hemlock Society USA) was an American right-to-die and assisted suicide advocacy organization which existed from 1980 to 2003, and took its name from the hemlock plant Conium maculatum, a highly poisonous herb in the carrot family, as a direct reference to the method by which the Athenian philosopher Socrates took his life in 399 BC, as described in Plato's Phaedo. It was co-founded in Santa Monica, California by British author and activist Derek Humphry, his wife Ann Wickett Humphry and Gerald A. Larue.