Back at home I am looking through my emails and I find a message from Ron's CarePages, the blog like service he and his family used to communicate during his illness. Reading the short message posted on this New York Times blog, I realize I have not yet written what I intended to, my small personal tribute to him.
My first memory of Ron is when I visited him in his small office in Rockville, near Washington DC when he was the Director of the Office of Smoking and Health, probably in 1989 or 1990. I was looking for free anti-tobacco videos I could use in France in case I had the opportunity to have some free space on TV.
Ron very gently and efficiently provided me with a series of TV clips and later on when I did get some free TV space he helped me get the professional format and the copyright authorizations.
He was therefore instrumental in helping the French tobacco control advocates air their first public service announcements in the early 90s. We used several clips devoted to second-hand smoke and children, an issue that at that time had then never been addressed on French TV. We also recycled some printed material for a campaign focusing on raising the awareness about smoking in a car with children present. To this date no such campaign has happened again.
Thousands of leaflets were distributed in the gas stations network of the French oil company ELF (since bought out by TOTAL) as part of an out of court settlement: I had threatened to sue them because they had distributed small F1 cars with the Gitanes name of them, a breach of the tobacco control law. In compensation they paid for the creation and distribution of the "Don't smoke out your children" leaflets during World No-Tobacco Day in May 1991. We aired the TV clips at the same time.
Years later I was surprised to find people who still remembered this campaign.
In 1994 during the World Conference in Paris, Ron invited me to join the board of editors of the Tobacco Control Journal he was launching. I had the most enviable position: in charge of the cartoons as Far Side Editor (a position later and still occupied by Stan Shatenstein). I remember not everybody was happy that cartoons were to be included in the Journal: they thought it was not serious, etc. I was elated because I knew the first thing most people read are the comics and of course a good picture is worth a thousand words. Ron obviously enjoyed and appreciated good cartoons and in fact he did most of the job. We can thank him for having introduced them into a scientific journal. To this day they remain what I read first within Tobacco Control.
Thank you again Ron for all you did, all over the world: la paix soit avec toi.
Philippe Boucher
Executive Director of the French National Committee for Tobacco Control (1991-1997)
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