Assisted suicide legalized in the Netherlands (in 2002), Belgium (in 2002), Luxembourg (in 2008), and Canada (in 2016). Assisted suicide, where the patient has to take the final action themselves (unlike voluntary euthanasia), is legal in Canada, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and parts of the United States. In the United States there are assisted dying laws restricted to terminally ill adults in Oregon, Montana, Washington, Vermont, Hawaii, California, Colorado and Washington D.C. The laws require that the patient's attending physician certify mental competence. Oregon was the first United States state to legalize assisted suicide, which was achieved through popular vote. The Act
Gerald A. Larue Humphry asked him to head it. Larue became founding president of the Hemlock Society aimed to provide information to the terminally ill and legalize physician-assisted suicide. "He stepped up to the plate when others were afraid," Humphry said. "He presided over Hemlock with great diplomacy when it was highly sensitive and controversial — when America was just beginning to address the subject of the hot-button topic of the right to choose to die when at life's end." Larue served for eight years, until Humphry moved the Hemlock Society to Oregon in 1988. Larue argued that the secular state must be