SRNT Newsletter

May/June 2005, Volume 11, Number 2

President's Column

by David Balfour

I have to say that it feels strange — and a little unnerving — writing my first column for the newsletter as your President. I don't think the idea had really sunk in completely until Ken Warner handed over the baton or, more accurately, the Presidential gavel at the end of the meeting in Prague. I know that Ken has received much praise for his fine stewardship of the Society, both privately and in public. One of the things I want to do in my first column is to take the opportunity to thank Ken again on behalf of the members of the Society, including particularly those who were not in Prague to say it personally. For much of the last year, I have sheltered under Ken's shadow and learned a great deal about how to be a good and effective President. I will certainly try to apply his friendly but persuasive methods during my term in office.

I took up office at the end of our recent highly successful meeting in Prague. I was a member of the European Board of SRNT when we originally discussed the possibility of our first joint meeting. We agonized over when and where it should be. It may come as a surprise to many of you to hear that there were some real concerns about our decision to hold a joint meeting and the decision to do so was not universally popular. As a result, we were not sure how many would attend. Within a day of the meeting actually starting, it was clear that we need not have worried. Prague is beautiful city. That and the quality of conference itself served to attract many people to the meeting. It proved to be the largest of any SRNT conference so far, approaching 950 delegates. Many members of the society chose to make the trip from the States, but we also attracted a significant number of delegates from Europe and elsewhere. It took us eleven years to experiment with the first joint meeting in Europe. The successes of the idea can be judged by the fact that, by the end of the meeting, I heard quite a few people arguing not if we should have another joint meeting, but about where it should be and when.

Elsewhere in the newsletter, you will be able to read a report of the meeting from David Drobes, Suzanne Colby, and Robert West. Suffice for me to say that, they organized an excellent program of lectures, symposia and workshops which kept us all busy and involved for the three days of the meeting. I will be honest and say that I have never attended an SRNT meeting at which I did not enjoy the program and learn a lot. Prague simply maintained this very high standard, one of which the Society can be justly proud. At the end of the meeting, I shared a taxi to the airport with David and his wife. They were off to Paris for a well-deserved holiday, and it was clear that David was in a mood to enjoy it after a job well done _ "demob-happy" is the term we might use in the UK (a term meaning the sense of elation when a job is finished and someone else takes it on).

It is important also to acknowledge that the success of meeting relied upon Bruce Wheeler and his team from Rees Group and Eva Kralikova and her colleagues in Prague. They have our heartfelt thanks for their sterling efforts. Bruce took over our account at about the same time as Ken became President. I think neither of them had really appreciated the complexities of organizing the annual meeting in a foreign land _ they do now! In spite of struggling with all sorts of problems, including missing flights and losing luggage, Bruce and his team (Sheila Kirschbaum, Jessie Goedken, Megan Starck and Stacey Phelps) were ever cheerful and helpful and had everything perfectly organized. This involved, on the first day of the meeting, getting up at 5:30am to begin setting everything up ready for a 7:00am start. I can attest to this because I heard them through my bedroom window.

Entrance to Prague Castle.
Photo: Raphaela Ninowski ©2005

On the evening of the second day of the meeting, I had the great pleasure of hosting an informal dinner for Eva. It was attended by most of the European Board plus Karl Fagerström, the founding father of SRNT Europe. As with many of the social events at the Prague meeting, Eva used her local knowledge to find a lovely restaurant for the dinner which provided us with an opportunity to show our thanks for all the time and trouble she had taken to make the meeting and our time in Prague as enjoyable as possible.

During the conference, a couple of issues were raised that merit some mention. The first concerns the Society's finances. At the members meeting, some may have gained the impression that the Society is awash with money. Thanks to the efforts of many who have gone before me on the Board, we are certainly not in the impoverished state we were a few years ago, and our finances are, I think, back on an even keel. However, I am not sure we are quite as rich as some think because we also have significant liabilities, particularly with regard to the expenses of the meeting just past. Nevertheless, as intimated at the meeting, we should now begin to think about the best ways to use our financial resources. The first thing that needs to be done is to establish a clear policy on the size of the reserves we should keep, and I plan to ask the finance committee to develop a policy on this issue. Once that is established, we will be in a better position to know what funds we have available and to begin thinking about how they may best be deployed. One thing that, perhaps, became clearer by taking the meeting to Prague was that, in some parts of the world, researchers who are interested in tobacco smoking and tobacco policy have relative few financial resources to support their interest in the subject. The Society might wish to consider the possibility of a differential fees structure to assist people in less well-off countries join the Society and benefit from its meetings and resources. These ideas, however, are at an early stage and, in due course, we will seek views.

Prague Bridge
Photo courtesy of Czech Tourism

One of the things that many of the delegates noticed in Prague is that it is not, by any means, a smoke free city. One of the reasons the European Board suggested holding our first joint meeting in central Europe was because there is a desperate need to help people, like Eva Kralikova, spread the smoke-free message to countries like the Czech Republic. However, quite a number of delegates argued that we should, in the future, hold our meetings in smoke-free cities. This idea has my personal support, and I understand that our next meetings, in Orlando and Austin, are in cities/venues that have smoke-free policies. Thereafter, it should be possible to find cities, in both the US and Europe, which can accommodate the SRNT meeting and which have smoke-free policies. The Executive Board will be considering this idea at its next conference call, and I hope we will be able to incorporate it into the bylaws in due course. This brings me nicely to one of the major tasks that Ken has left on my plate — the revision of the bylaws. Under Ken's guidance, this process is now well under way, and prior to the next full meeting of the Society, I anticipate that we will be able to present the revised bylaws to the membership for consideration and, hopefully, ratification — we will keep you all posted.