Eric Sterling

Eric E. Sterling has been a supporter of SSDP since 2000 when he arranged for the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation to finance SSDP’s prime sponsorship of College Convention 2000 in Manchester, NH at the time of the presidential primary. He served on SSDP’s board from 2004 to 2020, and is the first recipient of SSDP’s Eric Sterling Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2024, Eric was appointed by Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to serve on the Maryland Task Force on Responsible Use of Natural Psychedelic Substances. In 2013, Eric was appointed by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley to serve a four-year term on the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission. As the chair of the MMCC policy committee, Eric was a principal author of the regulations creating Maryland’s cannabis industry.

Eric was a student activist involved in campus governance at Haverford College and at Villanova Law School, and very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement before he graduated from college in 1973. He worked for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1969) and the Philadelphia Resistance (1970). His non-violent civil disobedience includes arrests inside the Pentagon in 1969, at the Upper Darby, PA draft board in 1970 and the Federal courthouse at Harrisburg, PA in 1972. He first testified for marijuana law reform in May 1976 while a law student.  For 32 years, he served as Executive Director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation advocating for drug legalization throughout the United States. The many drug warriors he has debated include U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden in 1989. He served as counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary (1979-1989) and as an assistant public defender in Delaware County, PA (1976-1979). He was a co-founder of the Marijuana Policy Project in 1995 and received NORML’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. He has appeared in numerous documentary movies about drugs and drug policy including a cameo appearance in Fantastic Fungi.