Harvey, who spent five years in India working for an aid agency in the 1960s and has a master's degree in family planning administration from the University of North Carolina, also runs DKT International, a non-profit organization focused on fighting STDs and overpopulation in poor and developing nations throughout the world.
DKT receives about $2 million of its working funds each year from Adam & Eve, which it uses to distribute condoms and other birth control devices for well below market value — often for pennies on the dollar, and often at a loss.
Harvey recently returned from one trip to Vietnam, where he visited “rest houses” — hotels that rent rooms for sex.
“I don't find this odd at all, but a lot of people do,” Harvey said of his charity work. “I mean, what else would I do with the money? This is my life's work. I can't think of any more enjoyable way to make use of those profits.”
Harvey says global disease prevention was one of his aims since he and Tim Black, another public-health proponent, founded Adam & Eve as a small mail order seller of condoms more that 35 years ago.
“We would sit down at the end of the week and count the money and pay the bills and we said, ‘There seems to be a little money left over here and that's probably a profit,’” Harvey said. “Then we started thinking about, well, how can we run a business whose profits could be used to help support international family planning programs?”
One would think the U.S. government would appreciate such efforts of private organizations acting on a global scale. But DKT was recently denied funding to support its AIDS-prevention initiative in Vietnam because Harvey refused to sign a pledge opposing prostitution.
Harvey has responded by filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for International Development and its “anti-prostitution” policy, saying it is an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and undermines international efforts to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS.
“We deal with sex workers as equals,” Harvey says of the suit. “We accept what they do as part of the reality of today’s world, and we do our best to empower them so they can adopt practices that will minimize the risk of HIV transmission for themselves and their partners, and improve their chances of getting access to life-saving health services. To do this work under an ‘anti-prostitution’ policy would be dysfunctional.”
