Staff

Executive Director:  Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn, D.D. brings to IDPI more than thirty years of experience leading the fight for social justice in synagogues in Australia, Israel, and in the United States.  In addition to Rabbinic Ordination, he has earned a Bachelors Degree from the University of Florida, as well as a Masters in Hebrew Letters and a Doctor of Divinity from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.  Today he is the leading advocate for drug policy reform in the faith community, bringing the message of compassion, not coercion, to clergy and all people of faith.

Associate Director:  Kristen Millnick, earned her B.A. in art and criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, where she had the opportunity to study Vancouver’s innovative harm reduction policies.  She was also a legislative affairs intern at Drug Policy Alliance.  In February of 2008, she joined IDPI and has organized clergy and religious support for a variety of drug policy reform issues across the country.

Leadership Council

Charles Thomas, IDPI’s President, has 15 years of professional experience in the drug policy reform movement. He co-founded the Marijuana Policy Project in 1995, served as director of communications, and left in 2001 to organize the religious community. As a Unitarian, he persuaded his denomination to adopt an official statement calling for drug decriminalization. Charles has testified before several federal and state legislative and regulatory bodies and has been quoted in most major news publications, including on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, and he has appeared on most television news networks.

Eric Sterling, J.D. worked as Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s and currently runs the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. As a Quaker, he convinced his denomination’s regional governing body to pass a marijuana decriminalization resolution in the mid-1970s. He also led a religious campaign in 2000, the Coalition for Jubilee Clemency, convincing President Clinton to release 23 prisoners of the Drug War.

Jane Marcus, Ph.D. worked through her congregation and the Women of Reform Judaism to persuade the Union for Reform Judaism to pass a resolution in 2003 calling for legal access to medical marijuana. Jane holds a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University.

Fr. Joseph Ganssle, OFM (deceased) founded and ran IDPI’s predecessor, Religious Coalition for a Moral Drug Policy in the early 1990s. Father Ganssle, a Catholic priest, served on the advisory board of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. He also founded a drug treatment program and served as its CEO for 25 years.

Rev. Andrew Gunn founded and ran Clergy for Enlightened Drug Policy, another IDPI predecessor. Earlier in his career Rev. Gunn, a United Methodist minister, was the executive director of the Alliance for the Separation of Church and State.

Rev. Eddie Lopez, Jr. is the former senior pastor of a large congregation in the South Bronx, and former director for Human Rights and Racial Justice for the General Board of Global Ministries for the United Methodist Church. As the former director of an Americorps program for the National Council of Churches, he recruited 1600 Latino people to volunteer in 800 non-profit organizations that address social needs. His ministry began at the NYC Department of Corrections where he served as the chaplain for adolescents. This is where he saw that the War on Drugs was causing more problems than it was solving.  He is currently the Director of Spiritual Care at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, CT.

William Martin, M. Div., Ph.D. is a sociology professor and a senior fellow for Religion and Public Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where he has taught since 1968. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School and received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His articles, mostly dealing with the intersection of religion and popular culture, have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and Texas Monthly, as well as in professional journals. His book, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story, is regarded as the authoritative biography of Billy Graham. He is also the author of With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, the companion volume to a six-hour documentary PBS mini-series of the same name. He is a frequent guest on national and local news and discussion programs. In addition to his work in religion, he taught criminology for thirty-five years and is currently exploring ways to reduce the harms associated with drug abuse and U.S. drug policy. Dr. Martin participated in a panel run by IDPI at the 2007 Drug Policy Alliance conference where he talked about why conservative evangelicals should not be written off as potential supporters of drug policy reform.

Mark Berkson, Ph.D. is a professor of religion at Hamline University. He also teaches a seminar on U.S. drug policy. Mark holds a B.A. from Princeton University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Berkson’s scholarly work has addressed topics such as death and dying, the use of entheogens (psychoactive sacraments) in religious ritual, and interfaith dialogue. Mark’s work in drug policy began with advocating for the historic 1996 ballot initiative in California to allow medical marijuana. He is currently chair of the Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota and recently gathered signatures from prominent faith leaders in the state to support a legislative effort for medical marijuana.