All good things eventually come to an end. “Don’t question why she needs to be so free... Dying all the time… Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.” This was all famously true of someone named “Ruby” on a foggy London Tuesday in the latter 1960s.  It may also ring just as true today for certain sociological paradigms (youngsters of the same era) that we also used to really love… but I won’t go there. On this occasion, I am writing to lament the end of a veritable institution that is slipping away from us (like Ruby in the darkest night) with this final issue of the Social Problems Forum: The SSSP Newsletter.  

Much about the field of Sociology, including the definition of what constitutes a social problem worthy of study, has changed since the inaugural issue of Social Problems was published in 1953.  In many ways, we’ve come a long way from the all-male lineup of authors in that first issue that featured papers on ethnic relations, civil rights law, international relations, technological change, and worker displacement.  Most of our readers now have an electronic subscription to Social Problems and can read our award-winning articles on-line, ahead-of-print (http://www.jstor.org/stable/socialproblems.just-accepted).  At the same time, we still aspire to fulfill the promise of Social Problems articulated by Ernest Burgess in the inaugural issue in 1953 (and here interpreted by me):  to publish cutting-edge, theoretically oriented, empirical research on a wide variety of social problems.  Burgess (1953) noted that the journal’s founders aspired for the journal to raise morale among scholars, especially students, working in fields, using methodologies, or generating findings that may be particularly subject to – or undermined by – criticism.  He also noted that the association, and the journal, aimed to be a hospitable home for interdisciplinary research. 

Those of you who were in Denver may remember the poem I read at the end of the Annual Business Meeting.  (If you missed my rendition of “The 2013 Annual Meeting Will Not Be Televised,” you can click to listen here: http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/pageid/1618/m/517).  Having just been passed the presidential gavel and sharing the excitement over President Wendy Simond’s fantastic “The Art of Activism” presentation, I could not resist exerting some poetic license of my own.  I’m sure you can appreciate the difficult task of trying to say something memorable when given just 4mins or less to introduce the following year’s annual meeting theme!

In courses on social problems and health, gender, aging and disability, the harmful side effects of prescription drugs are an overlooked epidemic. They are the 4^th leading cause of death in the United States and result in an estimated 1.5 million hospitalizations a year.(1) An estimated 46 million Americans suffer from harmful side effects, especially from newer drugs tested in trials that companies design to minimize evidence of harm and maximize evidence of benefits. Most vulnerable are women, people with chronic conditions, and seniors.