Eric Sterling ‘99 | Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

Eric E. Sterling has been a funder and advisor to SSDP since 1999, and been on SSDP’s board of directors since 2004. SSDP’s Lifetime Achievement Award is named after Eric, commemorating his contributions to the organization and drug policy reform. He has been an attorney forty years, has been active in several bar associations, and been part-time faculty at American University and George Washington University. He was a prominent student activist at Haverford College (’73) and Villanova Law School (’76). He was a public defender in the late 1970s. For nine years in the 1980s, he was counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, responsible for drugs, gun control, pornography, money laundering, organized crime, and other issues. He is Executive Director and co-founder of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation (1989), and co-founder and advisor of other drug policy and criminal justice reform organizations (MPP, FAMM). He is active in civic and community affairs, such as serving as past president of his local elementary school PTA. He is in his ninth year on the Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Advisory Council of Montgomery County, MD. In 2013, he was appointed by Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to a four-year term on the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission, where he was a leader in developing the regulations to implement medical cannabis production and distribution there. In 2015, he was presented with the NORML Lifetime Achievement Award. He is Vice-Chair of Marijuana Majority and a LEAP speaker. He led wilderness canoe trips in the mid 1970s, was active in trail and bicycle politics in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and climbed the Matterhorn in 1979. He loves biking, hiking, reading, cooking, parenting and dancing, and lives with his wife of 20 years in Maryland. His daughter is in the class of ‘20 at her college.