Biography
Dr. Shana Harris is a cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in drug use, “addiction,” and health politics and practice in Latin America and the United States. She received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology jointly from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in 2012. She was a National Institutes of Health-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Behavioral Science Training in Drug Abuse Research Program in New York City before joining the UCF faculty in 2015.
Dr. Harris’s current research focuses on medical travel and psychedelic-based drug treatment in Mexico. Her work has been supported by several institutions, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and has been published in top journals in her field, such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Human Organization, International Journal of Drug Policy, and Substance Use & Misuse.
Research Specialization
Interests:
Cultural and medical anthropology; drug use and “addiction”; global and public health; health politics and interventions; anthropology of science, technology, and medicine; Latin America; United States
Current Research:
Dr. Harris’s current ethnographic research focuses on the therapeutic use of psychedelics, particularly the utilization of ibogaine for drug treatment in Mexico. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in several plant species, most notably a rainforest shrub native to West Central Africa, that is being used for “addiction interruption.” Due to ibogaine’s illegality in the United States, numerous centers in Mexico have been established that cater to a primarily American clientele looking for drug treatment with the psychedelic. Since 2015, Dr. Harris has examined the use of ibogaine in several such centers in Baja California, Mexico, to understand the experience of undergoing drug treatment with ibogaine as well as crossing an international border to receive this alternative treatment.
Dr. Harris’s current collaborative research focuses on polydrug use and harm reduction in the United States. As part of UCF’s Harm Reduction Research Initiative and Substance Use Policy Evaluation and Research (SUPER) Workgroup, she works with scholars from multiple fields, including anthropology, medicine, and public health, to study opioid and stimulant co-use and harm reduction implementation and policy across the country.
Doctoral, Postdoctoral, and Other Research:
In her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Harris researched drug use and the politics and practice of harm reduction in Argentina. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires and Rosario between 2006 and 2008, her dissertation traced how harm reduction was adopted and implemented by local non-governmental organizations and select government agencies since the mid-1990s. She illustrated how this public health model influences the ways in which drug use, people who use drugs, and health are understood and approached institutionally in contemporary Argentina.
Additionally, she has conducted research on several other drug use-related topics, such as drug treatment access for college students in Florida, heroin injection and HIV/AIDS in Colombia, treatment with medications for opioid use disorder in the San Francisco Bay Area, and recreational gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB) use in Northern California.
