Beny J. Primm, M.D.
2013 Cato T. Laurencin M.D., Ph.D., Lifetime Research Award Recipient

ARTC founder Dr. Beny J. Primm has served unti12011 as its Executive Director for more than 40 years, and as President of the Urban Resource Institute since its creation in 1980. An expert in the field of substance abuse treatment, Dr. Primm received his medical degree from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and has been widely published in numerous medical journals and textbooks. Selected by four U.S. presidents to serve as consultant on a variety of substance abuse and public health issues, he was appointed to the Commission on AIDS by President Ronald Regan, selected as the first director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment of the US Department of health and Human Services by President George Bush, and named U.S. representative on issues of drug addiction and AIDS to the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Denied at home, Beny J. Primm, M.D. took schooling abroad. Dr. Beny J. Primm, a medical consultant to several U.S. Presidents, might not be a doctor today if not for the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, which welcomed Dr. Prirnn when U.S. medical schools routinely denied entrance to blacks. "I always dreamed of being a doctor," said Primm, whose success at treating drug addiction brought him to the attention of President Nixon. "When I was a little boy, my brother and I would build toy cities and I was always the doctor." Segregation made it so difficult for African-Americans to attend medical school that Primm said he knew people from three southern states whose tuition at the University of Geneva was paid by their states because no southern medical schools would admit them.

Since 1983, Dr. Primm has also been president of the Urban Resource Institute, an umbrella organization that supports various community-based initiatives and social service programs for battered women, the developmentally disabled, substance abusers, and those infected with HIV and AIDS. A national authority on drug addiction, Dr. Primm has served as an adviser to the National Drug Abuse Policy Office since the Nixon administration.

Dr. Primm is also internationally recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on HIV and AIDS, an area of study he pursued initially due to the disease's intimate relationship with addiction and the epidemic levels of infection among LV. drug users. He has served on the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic, and has represented the U.S. at numerous international conferences, including the World Health Organization's conference in Geneva and the International Conference for Ministers of Health on AIDS prevention in London.
 
Widely published, he has written over thirty articles on addictions, which have appeared in numerous medical texts and journals. He has also delivered speeches, lectures and keynote addresses around the world, and has been a visiting lecturer at a dozen different academic institutions, including Columbia University, Harvard University and New York University.