Peter Geoffrey Bourne (born 6 August 1939)[1][2] is a physician, anthropologist, author and international civil servant with experience in several senior government positions.
He is currently a visiting senior research fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford, vice-chancellor emeritus at St. George's University in Grenada and chair of the Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC).
[3] 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 spent one year (1965–1966) in Vietnam as chief of the neuropsychiatry section of the Army's Psychiatric Research Team, where he studied stress in helicopter ambulance medics and Special Forces.
Upon discharge from the Army, he was active in the anti-war movement and completed a residency (1967–1969) in psychiatry at Stanford University while concurrently pursuing graduate studies in anthropology.
Together with his first wife, Judith Rooks, Bourne led an effort to overturn Georgia's restrictive abortion laws.
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 resigned this position on 20 July 1978, amid controversy concerning his efforts to maintain the confidentiality of one of his staff for whom he had written a prescription for methaqualone.
Shortly thereafter, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws executive director Keith Stroup leaked Bourne's alleged use of cannabis and cocaine (which Bourne had previously characterized as being "acutely pleasurable" in "The Great Cocaine Myth," a 1974 article for the Drugs and Drug Abuse Education Newsletter)[9] at a party coinciding with the group's annual convention to journalists Gary Cohn and Jack Anderson in retaliation for the Carter administration's continued use of paraquat on Mexican cannabis fields.
[14] 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 when in the White House and at the UN, Bourne published in 1986 a well received biography of Fidel Castro.
[16] The study, translated into six languages, drew worldwide attention and lead to the establishment of the NGO, Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba (MEDICC).
[17] Its initial objective was to enable senior US medical students to spend six-week electives with family doctors in Cuba.
As an informal foreign policy advisor to Bill Richardson, Bourne accompanied the legislator to Baghdad in 1995 for a meeting he had negotiated with Saddam Hussein to secure the release of two American aerospace workers who had been captured by the Iraqis after wandering over the Kuwait border.
Richardson and Bourne subsequently collaborated on a number of such efforts in Iran, Peru, Cuba, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, and North Korea, where they helped win the release of an American lay preacher who had crossed to the wrong side of the border.
He was appointed as a visiting senior research fellow at Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford[3] 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.