National Minority AIDS Council Building Healthier Communities

Dr. Beny Primm was born on May 28, 1928, in Williamson, West Virginia, the son of an educator and a mortician. He was raised in a home where education was emphasized, and in 1941, Primm's mother, the principal of a local elementary school, moved the family to the Bronx, New York, so her sons could attend integrated high schools.

From an early age, Primm wanted to be a doctor, and after four years at DeWitt Clinton High School he received a basketball scholarship to attend Lincoln University. There, Primm was surrounded by bright and driven students. He left Lincoln after two years, unable to cope with the school's rigorous academic pressure, and later graduated from West Virginia State University. After several years in the military, Primm returned home with an injury and was unable to get into medical school in the United States. Having studied German in college, he decided to apply to the University of Heidelberg and was accepted in 1953. After a year at Heidelberg, Primm transferred to the University of Geneva, where he received his M.D. in 1959.

In 1969, he helped found the Addiction Research Treatment Corporation and has been the executive director ever since. A.R.T.C., located in Brooklyn, New York, is one of the largest minority nonprofit community-based substance abuse treatment programs in the country, treating more than 2,300 men and women from underserved communities.

Since 1983, 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, Primm has served as an adviser to the National Drug Abuse Policy Office for several years.

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 intravenous drug users. He has served on the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic, and has represented the United States 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, Primm has written more than thirty articles on addiction for 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 academic institutions.

He lives in New Rochelle, New York.