Supply Side Harm Reduction: Public Health Interventions in Drug Markets

Public health’s commitment to evidence-based policies and interventions has gained renewed significance in the “post-truth” era of MAGA-style politics in the United States. However, many scholars and health service providers remain blind to some of the key limitations of the evidence they rely on to conduct their work. In the field of harm reduction, the most significant restriction narrowing the scope of research and intervention is the field’s reluctance to engage with people who sell drugs. Focusing almost exclusively on people who use drugs, public health and harm reduction have relinquished key questions of political and public health significance concerning drug selling, mixing, adulteration, and transportation to criminal justice agencies, especially the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and local police forces. Public health has been relegated to the downstream management of substance use, while law enforcement agencies monopolize the upstream assessment of narcotics supply chains. What does it entail to incorporate people who sell drugs into harm reduction research and intervention? What do the humanities gain when they break away from their almost exclusive focus on the three prototypical figures of leftist thought: the victim, the ‘worthy’ laborer, and the enlightened activist?

About the Speakers

Fernando Montero is an anthropologist and an Associate Research Scientist in the Social Intervention Group at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. His ethnographic research combines the study of drug use and the study of drug selling to understand recent transformations to the street drug supply in the United States, especially the emergence of synthetic sedatives (fentanyl, xylazine, medetomidine) and the resurgence of synthetic stimulants (crystal methamphetamine). He recently obtained a 3-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop the concept of supply-side harm reduction, working with Latinx and Black people who sell drugs in Philadelphia to develop a drug overdose and HIV prevention intervention alongside community-based harm reduction organizations. 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.

Neni Panourgiá (moderator) is an anthropologist, Adjunct Associate Professor at the Psychology Department, Academic Adviser at the Justice-in-Education Initiative, and faculty at the Pr*son Education Program at Columbia University. In the New York Pr*son system, she teaches classes on anthropology and ethnography, cultural political thought, and critical medical studies. She works at the nexus of history, politics, and the apparatus of discipline focusing on the multi-valence of confinement. Among her monographs are Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography and Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. She has edited East of Attica. Photographs 1930-1997, “COVID-19: Auto-ethnographies of Incarceration,” and co-edited, with George Marcus, Ethnographica Moralia. Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology” and a new edition of Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher. Her essays have appeared in Mousse, Documenta, American Ethnologist, angelaki, Public Culture, Anthropology and Humanism, among others. Her latest book Λέρος: Η γραμματική του εγκλεισμού, (in Greek) is in its second edition and forthcoming in English as Foucault’s Node: Leros and the Grammar of Confinement.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities