AUG/SEPT 2005
Volume 11 - No. 3
SRNT Newsletter
Aug/Sept 2005, Volume 11, Number 3
In Memory of
Charyn Diane Sutton
April 6, 1947 - December 30, 2004
Charyn Sutton represented the best the tobacco control movement had to offer. As arguably the most outstanding spokesperson against tobacco industry attacks on the African-American community, Charyn was known and loved by many throughout the United States and around the world. Charyn had that unique ability to straddle the research and tobacco control arenas and make huge contributions in both. It would be no exaggeration to say that Charyn was the driving force in the overall drop in African-American smoking rates in the 1990s and the first part of this new century. To paraphrase Dr. Robert Robinson, Charyn's work on Pathways to Freedom, the development of the National African American Tobacco networks, her leadership in campaigns against Uptown, X, and menthol cigarettes in general has earned Charyn a singular spot in the history of African-American tobacco control.
We here at the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) are proud to have worked and been associated with Charyn. She was a guiding light and member of the steering committee for the First Conference on Menthol Cigarettes: Setting the Research Agenda, a conference that TRDRP helped to lead. Charyn had also been a peer reviewer for the TRDRP, serving on the Policy Study Section. Just this past fall, Charyn had been actively working with TRDRP applicants on a new and growing demographic of tobacco users: "secret smokers", i.e., those users who aren't publicly and openly smokers.
We are honored to know that our mission to mitigate the impact of tobacco-related diseases on California's burgeoning multiracial and multiethnic population was part of Charyn's anti-tobacco agenda. We want to lend our voice of support for the calls to bestow on Charyn the highest achievement awards from both the National Conference on Tobacco OR Health and the American Public Health Association.
To learn more about Charyn's contributions to our field, you may wish to read her obituary, written by Reverend Jesse Brown, which is available at http://www.trdrp.org/docs/newsletters/2005/405nwsltr.pdf.
Dr. Phillip Gardiner is the Research Administrator for Social and Behavioral Sciences with the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) at the University of California. More information on the TRDPR is available at http://www.trdrp.org/.