40 Under 40: Maritza Pérez Medina

Maritza Pérez Medina, director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, DC, has an impressive array of activist experience. Her youth in an immigrant mining family in Elko, NV, inculcated her vocation to challenge injustice and institutional racism. After earning a degree in journalism and Spanish at the University of Nevada, Reno and a stint with Teach For America at an under-resourced school in New Orleans, she got her law degree at UC-Berkeley. 

In 2015, Pérez Medina won a Soros Justice Fellowship at the Mexican American Legal Defense And Educational Fund (MALDEF) in DC, where she spearheaded a criminal justice reform program. This was followed by a year as senior policy analyst for criminal justice reform at the Center For American Progress. She joined DPA in December 2019—the first woman and first person of color to serve as the organization’s federal affairs director. She counts as a victory the passage by the US House of Representatives (2020 and 2022) of the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment & Expungement (MORE) Act, which would “deschedule” cannabis, removing it from the list of controlled substances. 

“Now is a very interesting and important time to be doing this work at the federal level,” Pérez Medina says. “There’s been historic progress, especially where it comes to marijuana, such as President Biden’s schedule review order. But we have to see what the final outcome is; anything short of descheduling wouldn’t be enough to make our communities whole. We need comprehensive marijuana reform in Congress. We have a lot of work to do, and it’s a very challenging environment now—but that makes it even more important that we continue to do it.”