Phil Harvey is the founder, owner, and president of Adam & Eve .
In 1969, Phil Harvey served in the United States Army and joined CARE, a humanitarian organization fighting poverty, participating in their pre-school feeding program in India. From this in-depth personal experience, he came to believe how the root of many social problems was the lack of effective planning. In 1970, with the assistance of Dr. Timothy Black, college graduate student Phil Harvey founded Adam & Eve as a part of his master’s thesis in family planning at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health, selling condoms thru the mail despite violating the 1983 Comstock Act. Adam & Eve became the first mail-order contraceptive business in America, leading the world in the evolution of marketing sex-based products (adult films and sexual paraphernalia) and its resulting legal court case battles with the federal government. He wrote a memoir entitled The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam and Eve, detailing from his point of view the political and legal persecution of his company and its civil liberties.
As an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and libertarian, Phil Harvey launched Population Services International, Inc., a nonprofit organization, which uses private sector funding to address the health problems of low-income and vulnerable populations in 60 developing countries. In addition, Phil Harvey established DKT International, continuing to champion the problems of family planning and charitable programs such as AIDS Prevention.