Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 from "death with dignity" and right to die groups who saw it as a model to be followed elsewhere, and widespread condemnation from euthanasia opponents, such as right to life groups, who sought to overturn it. Opponents also included the Australian Medical Association, and the Bishop of Darwin, Edmund John Patrick Collins. While the law was in effect, four people died by suicide through its provisions. The first was carpenter Bob Dent, 66, who died on 22 September 1996. Dent was a prostate cancer sufferer who became Australia's first person to lawfully end his life by means of physician assisted
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