Bio
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 (August 2025) 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. This work seeks to trouble longstanding conceptions of relationality and segregation (anti-relationality) in both prohibitionist and anti-prohibitionist discourse on drug policy, advocating that scholars engage in robust ethnographic inquiry into the relationships and non-passages between the production of knowledge and criminalizing practices, instead of assuming a straightforward complicity between scholarly, public, and state knowledge about drugs.