ARTC founder Dr. Beny J. Primm has served until 2011 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. Primm 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.
