People

PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, Columbia University
BA, History, Princeton University

Narcotics supply, people who sell drugs, supply-side harm reduction, substance use, synthetic narcotics, HIV/HCV, skin wounds and soft-tissue infections, xylazine, fentanyl

Fernando Montero is a medical anthropologist. His main project involves developing the field of “supply-side harm reduction” in the United States by incorporating people who sell drugs into harm reduction research and intervention. His mixed-methods research combines the study of drug use and the study of drug selling to better understand transformations to the street drug supply in the United States, especially the emergence of synthetic sedatives (fentanyl and xylazine) and stimulants (crystal methamphetamine). He focuses particularly on contemporary changes in the risk environment for HIV, HCV, soft-tissue infections, and fatal overdose among people who use drugs in Philadelphia and the wider Rust Belt region. One of the central questions guiding his current research is why the opioid overdose epidemic is increasingly affecting Black Americans following almost three decades in which it predominantly affected White working-class Americans. He is also conducting a long-term ethnographic study of the War on Drugs and militarization in the Afro-Indigenous region of Moskitia on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua and Honduras.

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Dr. Montero's Academia Profile