Peter Bourne Papers

Peter Bourne

Peter Bourne was born in 1939 in Oxford, England. He received his early education at the Dragon School before attending Whitgift School, Croydon. Following a year of undergraduate studies (1957-1958) at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Bourne was admitted to the University's School of Medicine, where he received his M.D. degree in 1962. He later received an M.A. in anthropology from Stanford University in 1969 After graduating from medical school he spent a year (1962-1963) as a fellow in Emory University's psychiatry department studying arrested alcoholics in the city jail in Atlanta. He established a ground-breaking program through which arrested alcoholics could take the drug Antabuse as an alternative to serving prison time. He was also active in the civil rights movement and participated in the effort to integrate lunch counters in the city. For the next year, he was a rotating intern at Kings County Hospital in Seattle, Washington.

In 1964, Bourne was commissioned as a Captain in the United States Army Medical Corps. He was assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), where he studied the psychological and physiological effects of stress on basic trainees as a research psychiatrist. He spent one year (1965-1966) in Vietnam as chief of the neuropsychiatry section of the Army's Psychiatric Research Team. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Air Medal, and the Combat Medics Badge.

In 1969, Bourne returned to Emory University as an assistant professor of psychiatry, preventive medicine and community health. He ran the mental health department of a federally-funded Community Health Center which he eventually expanded into a free standing community mental health center—the first in Georgia. Peter Bourne had run, as part of his mental health center, a treatment program for heroin addicts. As a result, Bourne was appointed by the newly elected Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter to set up Georgia's first statewide drug treatment program in 1971; from 1970 to 1973, he also served as Governor Carter's special advisor for health affairs. He remained personally close to Carter and was influential in convincing him to run for the Presidency. He would later become a key strategist and deputy campaign director for Carter, running the Washington office for the successful 1976 presidential campaign from 1975 to 1977.

As a result of setting up and successfully running Georgia's first statewide drug treatment program, Bourne left Emory in 1973 to take a position as assistant director in charge of treatment programs in President Richard Nixon's Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP). He did so with the intention of resigning as soon as Carter announced his plans to run for the presidency. After leaving the Nixon administration in 1974, he served as president of the Foundation for International Resources and a fellow at the Drug Abuse Council through 1976. From 1974 to 1979, he was also a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School with a clinical appointment at McLean Hospital in Boston. Throughout this frenetic period, he also held consultancies with the World Health Organization and the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs.

Under Jimmy Carter, Bourne was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Health Issues and Director of the Office of Drug Abuse Policy (ODAP). He resigned this position on July 20, 1978, amid controversy concerning his efforts to maintain the confidentiality of one of his staff for whom he had written a prescription. Under his leadership, however, the number of deaths from drug overdoses dropped to its lowest level in 30 years. Bourne served as the personal envoy of the President of the United States in bilateral discussions with heads of state or governments in Burma, Colombia, Thailand, the Philippines and Jamaica. He chaired the World Hunger Working Group, a sub-cabinet committee formed to formulate new US policy with regard to world hunger. This led to the establishment of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger and Malnutrition. He also chaired the Interagency Committee on World Health formed to review the US role in global health and to formulate new presidential initiatives in this area. He was the White House coordinator for the Presidential Commission on the UN International Year of the Child, and also worked with Rosalynn Carter to establish a Commission on Mental Health and Mental Illness. Bourne also served on the President's Commission on White House Fellows.

In 1979, Bourne became an Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations, where he established and ran the "International Drinking Water and Sanitation Decade," a 10-year program that would provide clean drinking water to more than 500 million people worldwide. As part of the program Bourne launched, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a global campaign to eradicate the water borne disease caused by guinea worm. Eventually he convinced former President Carter to become the public face of the campaign which is now nearing complete success.

After leaving the UN in 1982 for the private sector, Bourne established an NGO, Global Water, to pursue the same goals as the UN program. Building on a long-standing interest in the Cuban health care system and relationships established during several visits to the country, Bourne published in 1986, a well-received biography of Fidel Castro. In 1995, as chairman of the American Association for World Health he directed a year-long foundation-supported study of the impact of the US embargo on health and nutrition in Cuba Denial of Food and Medicine: The Impact of the US Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba. He co-authored the subsequent report. The study, translated into six languages, drew worldwide attention and lead to the establishment of the NGO, Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC).

In 1998 he moved to Grenada, West Indies, and became Vice Chancellor of St. George's University until 2003. Over the next five years he built and enhanced the reputation of the medical school, established a school of veterinary medicine, grew the embryonic school of arts and sciences into the second largest institution in the region for students of Caribbean origin.

In 2003 Bourne left Grenada and returned to Washington, D.C. He was appointed as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford and began dividing his time between the US and the UK. This included increasing the time he spent at his farm in Wales where he raised red deer, llamas and North American bison.