Department of Anthropology and
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and
College of Arts and Sciences
Lee D. Hoffer is a Professor of Medical Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, with an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry. He holds graduate degrees in Anthropology and Health and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Colorado–Denver and a Master of Psychiatric Epidemiology from Washington University School of Medicine.
For more than two decades, Dr. Hoffer has studied how illegal drug markets operate and how drug use shapes lives and communities, integrating ethnographic fieldwork, epidemiology, and computational modeling. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Nature, and The Washington Post.
Trained as a pre- and postdoctoral fellow through NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse, he has since directed more than $8 million in federally funded research. He has served on the U.S. FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and contributed to a landmark National Academies of Sciences report on pain management and the opioid crisis.
Dr. Hoffer teaches courses on illegal drugs and society and ethnographic research methods, and leads a hands-on course engaging students in community-based addiction research. He also collaborates with harm reduction programs across Ohio to translate research into public health action.
Research Information
Research Interests
Media about Dr. Hoffer's Research
Arthur Evenchik. (Fall 2012/Winter 2013). Street-Level Anthropology. art|sci magazine, College of Arts and Sciences, CWRU, vol. 9 (1).
Media citing Dr. Hoffer's Research
The Wrong Way to Fight the Opioid Crisis – The New Yorker
Report: Rethinking the “Drug Dealer” (see link on this page) – Drug Policy Alliance
How Digital Drug Users Could Help to Halt the US Opioid Epidemic – Nature
Following Heroin’s Path from Mexico to the Midwest – The Washington Post
How Mexican Drug Cartels are Fueling America’s Deadly Heroin Epidemic – The Week
How Business of Fentanyl Controls Ohio’s Opioid Crisis – The Columbus Dispatch
Sample publication
- (2016) Hoffer, Lee. The Space Between Community and Self-Interest: Conflict and the Experience of Exchange in Heroin Markets. The Economics of Ecology, Exchange, and Adaptation: Anthropological Explorations Research in Economic Anthropology. (36):167-196. ISSN: 0190-1281/doi:10.1108/S0190-128120160000036007.
Research Projects
Research project
- Researching the Social Dynamics of a Local Methamphetamine Market (NIH, NIDA, R01) 2010-2016 (Abstract )
- Merging Agent-based Modeling Techniques and Ethnography: A New Analytic Tool for Studying Illicit Drug Use Behaviors, Markets and Economies (NSF) 2008-2011(Abstract)
- Evaluating the Social Structure of a Local Heroin Market (NIH, NIDA, R21) 2005-2008 (Abstract)
- A Heroin Dealing Network: Asymmetric Power and HIV Risk (NIH, NIDA, F31) 2000-2002 (Abstract)
Classes taught
(Fall) Economic Anthropology (Link to course description coming soon)
(Fall) Ethnographic & Qualitative Research Methods (Link to course description)
(Spring) Illegal Drugs and Society (Link to course description)
(Spring) Graduate Seminar – Ethics & Ethnography (Link to course description coming soon)
Graduate Trainees
- (2012) Schlosser, A.V. and Hoffer, L.D., The Psychotropic Self/Imaginary: Subjectivity and Psychopharmaceutical Use Among Heroin Users with Co-Occurring Mental Illness. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 36(1): 26-50.