Adam & Eve Founder Phil Harvey Passes Away

LOS ANGELES — Phil Harvey, the adult industry pioneer, sex-positive advocate, global philanthropist and co-founder of retail giant Adam & Eve, has passed away, according to DKT International, the non-profit organization he founded that has been promoting family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention for more than 30 years. Harvey, who was chairman of the DKT's board, died at home Thursday of natural causes at age 83. Harvey in 2013—at the 30th annual AVN Awards Show—received only the second-ever Visionary Award—not only for his success in taking a novelty start-up company into nearly every realm of adult commerce, but also for his sense of civic responsibility in helping to prevent the scourge of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies from destroying lives in Third World countries. He built Adam & Eve from its early days in 1972 as a mail-order business in a single room at Central Carolina Bank in Chapel Hill, N.C. The company quickly grew to become one of the largest retailers of adult products in the world. From 1986 to 1993, Harvey battled charges leveled against Adam & Eve by the Justice Department and then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, eventually defeating the charges in a victory for freedom of expression. Harvey chronicled the case in his 2001 book, "The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam and Eve." He had a nearly lifelong interest in family planning, and it was partly the poverty and disease he saw while working overseas that inspired him and Adam & Eve co-founder Tim Black to return to college and enter a one-year master’s program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in family planning administration. Harvey delivered the keynote address at the 2010 AVN Show in Hollywood, Florida. Also in 2010, Harvey donated $100,000 to the Drug Policy Action Committee to Tax and Regulate Marijuana, which was backing California’s Proposition 19, a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for adults over 21, allow small residential cultivation, and permit local governments to tax and regulate pot sales. A tireless advocate for free speech, Harvey was targeted by the government during the mid-80s and into the 1990s, when he finally had enough and turned the tables on his persecutors by suing the Department of Justice, forcing it into retreat and eventual abject surrender. Famous for his lifelong philanthropy, when Harvey was 25 he worked in India for five years for CARE, where his experience working on large-scale feeding programs for the poor sowed the seeds for his later charitable work. He came away determined to find solutions, and for he most part has succeeded in every endeavor because of the clarity of his purpose and the methodical nature of his character. In addition to his work with Adam & Eve, Harvey is the primary sponsor of The Liberty Project, a nonprofit organization which raises awareness about First Amendment issues. Harvey also was the author of "Let Every Child Be Wanted: How Social Marketing Is Revolutionizing Contraceptive Use Around the World."