The research team, led by Lateef Olutoyin Oluwole and Adetunji Obadeji of the Department of Psychiatry, conducted four focus group discussions with 22 young adults aged 18 to 47 who were receiving treatment for mental and behavioural disorders linked to psychoactive substance use. Seventeen of the participants were male and five female, with a mean age of just over 25 years. Most had tertiary education, a detail that punctures the stereotype of the fraudster as an uneducated dropout. Participants were identified through careful, ethically supervised clinical screening, and only those who had personally disclosed direct or vicarious involvement in internet fraud were included. Sessions lasted between 60 and 90 minutes and were analysed thematically using Braun and Clarke’s established six-step framework, with the research team continuing until data saturation was reached at the fourth discussion.

The scale of the underlying problem is staggering. Recent studies cited by the authors document lifetime psychoactive substance use among Nigerian university students reaching 86 percent, with regional prevalence rates of 44 percent for alcohol, 30 percent for tramadol, between 6 and 16 percent for cannabis, and 11 percent for codeine. More alarming still is the emergence of new psychoactive substances, including synthetic cannabinoids sold under street names such as “Wiz,” “Black Mamba” and “Colorado,” which are marketed through online platforms and local outlets with deceptive labelling and are associated with severe neuropsychiatric effects including psychosis and hallucinations. Against this backdrop, Nigeria’s demographic profile, in which individuals under 35 constitute more than 70 percent of the population, means that the intersection of drug use and cybercrime touches an enormous share of the nation’s future workforce.

What the focus groups revealed is that the relationship between substances and fraud operates through at least three distinct patterns. The first is functional linkage: substances used deliberately to enhance fraudulent performance. Participants described smoking synthetic cannabinoids to stay awake through long nights of online scamming, or using tramadol and cannabis to summon the confidence needed to manipulate victims. “When they use tramadol or loud, it gives them confidence to talk to clients online,” one participant explained. The second pattern is independence, where the two behaviours coexist without direct connection; many participants knew fraudsters who avoided drugs entirely, and drug users with no involvement in fraud. The third, and perhaps most destructive, is bidirectional reinforcement, in which fraud proceeds fund escalating substance use while substances sustain the emotional and physical capacity to continue defrauding victims.

Peer influence emerged as the most consistently cited driver across every discussion group. The researchers frame this through Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory, which holds that deviant behaviour is learned through intimate social interaction. Participants described acquiring not only the technical knowledge of fraud schemes but also the rationalisations that make them acceptable. “If your guy is doing Yahoo and you see him driving Benz, you go want join too,” one speaker said. Crucially, the authors found that peer influence now extends beyond face-to-face networks into mediated channels: Instagram displays of fraud-derived wealth create aspirational models that reach far beyond immediate friendship circles, effectively digitising the social transmission of deviance.

Beneath the peer dynamics lies a structural engine that the researchers interpret through Merton’s Strain Theory. When culturally prescribed goals, financial success, material display, social status, are pursued in a society where legitimate routes such as education and formal employment are systematically blocked, illegitimate pathways become rational choices for some. Participants spoke of poverty as the fundamental push factor and of intense family expectations, particularly on firstborn sons, to provide. “It’s poverty that is pushing them… they want to make it fast,” one participant said. The frustration of educated unemployment, the perception that the system has failed, and the visible rewards of fraud combined to produce what the authors describe as a maladaptive response to the disjuncture between aspiration and opportunity.

Perhaps the most unsettling finding concerns the family and community. Rather than uniformly condemning fraud, participants described a spectrum of parental responses ranging from unknowing enablement to active complicity. Some parents remained silent once money began flowing home; a few reportedly prayed for their sons’ success in fraud; others took their children to traditional healers, or babalawos, for spiritual “fortification” before fraudulent ventures. The authors argue that this cultural ambivalence, a system that simultaneously prohibits and enables, may be more consequential for youth behaviour than either clear condemnation or clear approval, because it creates exploitable ambiguity. Social media, pop culture and the visible material success of “big boys” reinforce the normalisation, with participants noting that fraud is now regarded in many communities as a normal job, morally softened by comparisons such as “not stealing with a gun.”

The biopsychosocial model completes the theoretical triad. Biologically, substances alter brain chemistry in ways that impair judgment and increase impulsivity, effects that may facilitate fraud. Psychologically, substances serve as self-medication for the distress arising from economic pressure, family conflict and the moral tensions of deceiving others. Socially, peer networks supply both the context for use and the normative framework for fraud. The authors stress that these frameworks are complementary rather than competing: strain theory explains the structural pressures, differential association explains how deviant responses are transmitted, and the biopsychosocial model explains how these forces manifest in individual experience.

Yet beneath the bravado and the Benz photographs, the study documents a hidden toll. Despite widespread normalisation, participants consistently reported guilt, remorse, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, intrusive thoughts about victims and difficulty forming trusting relationships. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, even after making money. The guilt is real,” one speaker admitted. Others described violence and depression when fraud ventures failed. This coexistence of external reward and internal distress, the authors note, complicates simplistic portrayals of “Yahoo boys” as simply immoral; even within deviant subcultures, individuals retain a moral awareness that carries real psychological cost, and young adults with mental health conditions appear significantly more vulnerable to new psychoactive substances, which in turn further impair judgment and increase susceptibility to fraudulent involvement.

The participants themselves offered a roadmap for intervention that the authors endorse: economic empowerment and job creation, parenting and family training programmes that replace punitive discipline with emotional connection, recreational and vocational initiatives, mental health support and mentorship, and faith-based moral reorientation. “If there are jobs or skills training, many won’t do Yahoo or drugs,” one participant said. The researchers caution that their sample, drawn from a single treatment facility in southwestern Nigeria, may limit generalisability, and that the clinical setting could have emphasised pathological aspects of participants’ experiences. Still, the consistency of narratives across groups lends weight to the central conclusion: substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths are not isolated acts of deviance but interconnected maladaptive coping strategies within contexts of structural inequality, demanding integrated, youth-focused responses that address mental health, family dynamics and economic opportunity together rather than treating either crisis alone.

Subject of Research: The psychosocial and cultural drivers linking psychoactive substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths

Article Title: Psychosocial and cultural dynamics shaping substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths

Article References: Oluwole, L. O., Obadeji, A., Ajiboye, A. S., & Atofarati, M. A. (2026). Psychosocial and cultural dynamics shaping substance use and internet fraud among Nigerian youths. Discover Mental Health, 6(1), Article 178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00476-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00476-7

Keywords: substance use, internet fraud, Yahoo Yahoo, Nigeria, youth, cybercrime, mental health, peer influence, strain theory, new psychoactive substances, qualitative research, cultural normalisation

The scale of the problem motivating the study is considerable. New psychoactive substances—a shifting family of synthetic compounds designed to mimic the effects of controlled drugs while evading legal restrictions—have become one of the most difficult fronts in global drug policy. Because their chemical structures change constantly, their health consequences are poorly characterized, and people who begin using them in adolescence face heightened risks of lasting neurobiological and psychological harm. The adolescent brain, with its early-maturing reward circuitry and still-developing self-control systems, is particularly vulnerable to substance initiation and to the entrenched patterns of craving that follow.

To uncover the hidden structure of craving, the researchers assessed 1,008 patients in Tianjin whose substance use disorder began during adolescence. Rather than reducing craving to a single score, the team measured three separate dimensions: the intensity of craving itself, the degree to which it interfered with daily functioning, and the effort patients expended resisting it. Latent profile analysis—a form of statistical modeling that sorts individuals into unobserved subgroups based on patterns across multiple measures—was then applied to see whether distinct combinations of these dimensions existed within the sample.

Three profiles emerged, and they were strikingly uneven in size. The largest group, accounting for 54 percent of participants, was labeled relatively stable, showing moderate craving without overwhelming functional disruption. A second group, 40.2 percent of the sample, fell into a high craving struggle category marked by intense urges and an exhausting internal battle to resist them. The smallest but most concerning group, 6 percent, was described as functionally impaired, in which craving severely disrupted everyday life. That two in five patients occupied the high struggle profile underscores how common severe craving is in this population—and how misleading it would be to treat them all identically.

Identifying the profiles was only the first step. The team then asked whether psychosocial information could predict which profile a patient belonged to, using three machine learning models of increasing sophistication: logistic regression, a classical statistical baseline; random forest, an ensemble method that averages many decision trees; and XGBoost, a gradient-boosted algorithm known for its performance on tabular medical data. Performance was evaluated using macro-AUC, accuracy, and Macro-F1 scores, metrics that account for the imbalanced group sizes. XGBoost achieved the strongest discrimination among the three, although the researchers are candid that overall classification performance remained modest—a limitation they attribute to the exploratory nature of the work and the complexity of the underlying constructs.

Perhaps the most clinically valuable output came from interpreting the models. Using SHAP, an explainability technique that quantifies each feature’s contribution to predictions, the researchers identified the psychosocial variables that most strongly distinguished the craving subgroups. Social support emerged as a leading factor, consistent with a growing body of evidence that supportive networks buffer against relapse. Resistance to peer influence also ranked highly—a finding that resonates with developmental research showing adolescence as the period of peak susceptibility to peer pressure. Coping style, childhood adversity, age, and age at first drug use completed the list of key contributors, weaving together life history, developmental timing, and present-day resources into a single predictive picture.

These findings align closely with the biopsychosocial model of addiction, which holds that substance use disorders arise from interactions among biological vulnerability, psychological processes, and social context rather than from any single cause. The prominence of childhood adversity in the models echoes systematic reviews linking early maltreatment to elevated risk of substance misuse, while the role of social support reflects studies demonstrating that perceived support moderates the relationship between stress and relapse. By embedding these factors in a quantitative, subgroup-aware framework, the study gives that conceptual model a practical, data-driven form.

The authors are careful to frame the work as exploratory rather than definitive. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causal direction—for instance, whether low social support drives intense craving or vice versa. The modest discriminative performance means the models are not yet ready for individual-level clinical decisions, and the data, which contain sensitive personal information, are not publicly available for reasons of privacy protection. Still, the researchers argue that the approach may provide preliminary evidence for risk stratification and for subgroup-sensitive addiction nursing support, in which care is tailored to whether a patient fits the stable, high struggle, or functionally impaired pattern.

If future longitudinal studies confirm and refine these profiles, the implications could be far-reaching. A patient in the functionally impaired group might warrant immediate intensive intervention, while someone in the high craving struggle group might benefit most from coping-skills training and peer-resistance support, and those in the stable group from relapse prevention and social strengthening. In an era when new psychoactive substances continually outpace regulation and traditional treatment models, the ability to sort patients by their actual craving signature—rather than a one-size-fits-all label—could mark a meaningful shift toward precision medicine in addiction care. The study, funded by the Ministry of Education in China, is an early but provocative demonstration that the algorithms of machine learning can find order in one of addiction’s most stubborn and subjective experiences.

Subject of Research: Exploratory risk stratification of adolescent-onset new psychoactive substance use disorder using latent craving profiles and machine learning

Article Title: Exploratory Risk Stratification of Patients With Adolescent-Onset New Psychoactive Substance Use Disorder: Integrating Latent Craving Profiles, Psychosocial Factors, and Machine Learning

Article References: Zhuang, S., Che, X., Song, Y., Li, S., Shang, X., Shi, L., Zhang, X., Song, C., Jing, J., Fan, J., Qin, S., Xu, Z., Zhang, J., Li, J., Li, L., Hou, K., & Jiang, Y. (2026). Exploratory Risk Stratification of Patients With Adolescent-Onset New Psychoactive Substance Use Disorder: Integrating Latent Craving Profiles, Psychosocial Factors, and Machine Learning. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01714-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01714-3

Keywords: new psychoactive substances, adolescent-onset substance use disorder, craving, latent profile analysis, machine learning, XGBoost, SHAP, social support, childhood adversity, risk stratification, addiction nursing, peer influence

The study, conducted by Bomi Jin and Lonn Lanza-Kaduce of the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida, is published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice. Rather than treating schools simply as protective institutions that supervise young people, the authors reframe them as structured social environments that organize adolescents’ face-to-face interactions — including interactions with marijuana-using peers. When schools closed, that organizing structure dissolved; when they reopened, it snapped back, with measurable consequences for the transmission of substance use behavior through peer networks.

The theoretical foundation draws on Akers’ social structure and social learning framework, an extension of Edwin Sutherland’s classic differential association theory. In its simplest form, differential association holds that criminal and deviant behavior is learned through interaction with intimate personal groups, where individuals acquire not only the techniques of deviance but also the attitudes, definitions, and reinforcement patterns that sustain it. Social learning theory, developed by Ronald Akers and colleagues, added mechanisms of differential reinforcement, imitation, and definitions favorable or unfavorable to law-violating behavior. Meta-analytic reviews have consistently ranked peer associations among the strongest predictors of adolescent delinquency and substance use. What the structural branch of the theory adds is the insight that macro-level and organizational contexts — neighborhoods, communities, and schools — pattern the frequency, duration, priority, and intensity of those associations.

Jin and Lanza-Kaduce seized on a rare analytical opportunity embedded in the pandemic. Because Florida school districts resumed in-person instruction at different points during the 2020–2021 academic year, students across the state faced sharply different levels of in-person peer contact at the same moment in time. The researchers used this variation in school return timing as a proxy for the degree of face-to-face interaction adolescents had with their peers. Students in early-returning districts were reimmersed in hallways, classrooms, lunchrooms, and after-school spaces where friendships are enacted bodily — through conversation, shared routines, and what interactionist scholars call interaction rituals — while late returnees remained more dependent on digital communication, which prior research suggests carries weaker or at least different socialization signals than physical co-presence.

The empirical analysis drew on statewide survey data from Florida middle and high school students in grades 6 through 12, with an analytical sample of 7,656 adolescents. The data came from the Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey, an instrument designed to measure risk and protective factors for adolescent substance use and problem behaviors. The outcome of interest was adolescents’ own marijuana use, and the central explanatory variable was friends’ marijuana use, alongside the school return timing that distinguished early returnees from later ones. The models also controlled for established individual and family-level predictors, including low self-control, measured through items adapted from Grasmick and colleagues’ widely used scale, and parental monitoring, with full item wording provided in the study’s online supplement.

Methodologically, the study confronted several challenges familiar to survey researchers. Missing data were substantial and, importantly, not missing completely at random: additional analyses following the approach of Meldrum and colleagues revealed significant mean differences on study variables between cases with and without missing responses, undermining the assumption of randomness. The authors therefore employed multiple imputation using chained equations, a modern technique that preserves uncertainty while filling in missing values based on observed relationships. Because marijuana use in the sample was a relatively low-prevalence behavior, which can bias maximum-likelihood estimates in logistic regression, the researchers also ran penalized Firth logistic regressions, a technique designed to stabilize estimates for rare events; the substantive conclusions were unchanged. To interpret the interaction between school return timing and friends’ use in a nonlinear probability model, the study drew on contemporary best practices for presenting and testing interaction effects in generalized linear models.

The results split cleanly into two parts. Evidence for mediation — the idea that returning to school earlier indirectly increases marijuana use by increasing friends’ marijuana use — was, in the authors’ words, limited. The structural timing of school reopening did not simply manufacture new marijuana-using friendships that then produced use. Instead, the striking finding was moderation: the association between friends’ marijuana use and adolescents’ own use was substantially stronger among early returnees than among later returnees. In other words, having marijuana-using friends predicted a student’s own marijuana use much more powerfully when those friendships were being enacted in person at school. The effect was particularly pronounced among adolescents with multiple marijuana-using friends, suggesting a dose-response pattern in which exposure to several using peers, combined with daily physical co-presence, created the strongest gravitational pull toward use.

These findings carry weight for how scientists understand the mechanics of peer influence. Social learning researchers have long distinguished between what peers think and what peers do, and laboratory and field work on ‘deviancy training’ has shown that adolescent friendships can become engines of reinforcement for rule-breaking talk and behavior. The Florida results imply that this training accelerates in the environments where it can be rehearsed and rewarded most consistently — the structured but only partially supervised social spaces of the school day and its surrounding routines. They also align with research on unstructured socializing, which finds that unsupervised time with peers is a robust situational trigger for delinquency, and with studies showing that school-adjacent settings shape patterns of adolescent alcohol and marijuana use. The virtual substitutes adolescents relied on during remote schooling — messaging, social media, gaming — appear to have sustained friendships but not to have replicated the intensity of in-person reinforcement, consistent with emerging evidence that online and offline peer influences operate differently.

The study is not without limitations, and the authors are candid about them. The data are cross-sectional, which constrains causal inference; perceived friends’ use may partly reflect projection, the well-documented tendency of adolescents to assume their friends behave as they do. The marijuana measure did not separately capture edible forms of the drug. And because the sample is statewide rather than nationally representative, generalization requires caution. Nevertheless, the pandemic-generated variation in school return timing offers a form of leverage that ordinary survey designs rarely achieve, and the consistency of the moderation result across estimation strategies strengthens confidence in the core conclusion.

The practical implications reach beyond criminology into public health and school policy. Prevention programs have traditionally targeted individual adolescents — educating them about drug risks, building refusal skills, strengthening self-control. The Florida study suggests that such individual-level interventions, while valuable, miss a structural layer: the social settings through which marijuana-using friends exert their influence. Schools, in this framing, are not merely backdrops but active organizers of peer exposure. Prevention efforts, the authors argue, may benefit from extending into the social environments where in-person interactions with marijuana-using peers occur — the rhythms of the school day, the transitions between classes, the informal gatherings before and after instruction — with particular attention to students who report multiple friends who use marijuana. As districts worldwide continue to weigh the costs and benefits of remote, hybrid, and in-person instruction, the study adds an unexpected variable to the calculus: the timing of a school’s reopening may shape not only learning loss and mental health, but the very social channels through which adolescent substance use spreads.

Subject of Research: How variation in school return timing during the COVID-19 pandemic moderated the association between deviant peer association and adolescent marijuana use.

Article Title: Structural Context, Deviant Peer Association, and Adolescent Marijuana Use: Evidence from Variation in School Return Timing during the Pandemic

Article References: Jin, B., & Lanza-Kaduce, L. (2026). Structural Context, Deviant Peer Association, and Adolescent Marijuana Use: Evidence from Variation in School Return Timing during the Pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09947-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09947-7

Keywords: adolescent marijuana use, peer influence, differential association, social learning theory, school return timing, COVID-19, Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey, criminology, substance use prevention, deviant peers, Structural, Context

The scale of the dataset sets this study apart from much of the existing literature. Liu examined records of 15,077 youth under community supervision, a sample that was 49 percent Black, 16 percent Hispanic, and 16 percent female. Such a large, diverse sample allowed the researcher to detect patterns that smaller studies of incarcerated or clinical populations might miss. The participants were drawn from a statewide juvenile justice system, meaning the findings reflect the everyday realities of youth living at home, attending school, and navigating their neighborhoods while under supervision, rather than the artificial conditions of residential facilities.

Methodologically, the study employed multivariate logistic regression alongside marginal effect analyses, a combination that lets researchers estimate not just whether an association exists but how large it is across different subgroups. Crucially, Liu controlled for a battery of potential confounders that could otherwise masquerade as skill effects: childhood abuse, neglect, exposure to violence, substance use, impulsivity, and delinquent history. This matters because justice-involved youth frequently carry heavy burdens of adverse childhood experiences, and failing to account for them could distort any estimate of how communication skills operate. By holding these factors constant, the analysis isolates the specific contribution of interpersonal competence and its interaction with social context.

The central finding is both intuitive and radical. Communication skills did significantly reduce aggression across the sample, confirming decades of research linking verbal and social competence to lower rates of hostile and violent behavior. But the magnitude of that reduction was not uniform. Youth who primarily associated with delinquent peers, or who reported having no close friends, saw substantially weaker protective benefits than those embedded in prosocial peer groups. In other words, a skill that acts like a shield in one social environment can behave like a modest filter in another. The protective power of communication is not a fixed property of the individual but a property of the individual-in-context.

This interaction effect has deep theoretical roots. Social learning theory has long argued that behavior is learned and reinforced within networks of significant others, meaning that deviant peer groups can actively reward aggression and punish conciliatory communication. Ecological models of human development similarly hold that individual competencies only translate into outcomes when the surrounding microsystems support them. The new findings give these classic frameworks a sharp, quantitative edge: they demonstrate empirically that individual-level protective factors require compatible social contexts to achieve their optimal impact. A teenager may possess excellent conflict-resolution abilities, but if every social cue in their circle signals that toughness pays and de-escalation is weakness, those abilities may rarely be deployed.

The role of social isolation emerged as equally consequential. Youth with no close friends experienced diminished benefits from their communication skills, a finding that aligns with a growing body of research on loneliness and social threat. Lonely children show heightened hypervigilance for social rejection, and adolescents without friendships lose the everyday practice ground where communication skills are typically refined and reinforced. Skills that go unused can atrophy, and in the absence of trusted peers, even well-developed verbal abilities may not translate into de-escalated conflicts. For youth professionals, this suggests that simply assessing a young person’s skills tells only half the story; mapping their social world is equally essential.

Beyond peers, the study found that engagement with prosocial nonparental adults also moderated the relationship between communication skills and aggression. Mentors, coaches, teachers, and other caring adults appear to provide an audience and reinforcement structure in which skilled communication is valued and rewarded. This finding carries practical weight for juvenile justice systems, which often emphasize family engagement but may overlook the developmental importance of nonparental prosocial ties during adolescence, a life stage when youth naturally orient toward people outside the home. Programs that deliberately connect supervised youth with committed adults may therefore amplify the returns on any skills-based intervention they deliver.

The implications for intervention design are profound. Aggression replacement training and related curricula, which teach prosocial skills to aggressive youth, have shown mixed results across settings, and this study offers a compelling explanation for that inconsistency: skills taught in isolation from environmental change may not survive contact with delinquent peer networks. Liu’s conclusion is that communication-skills training should be explicitly paired with efforts to expand youths’ access to prosocial peers, adults, and structured activities. Doing so creates the reinforcement ecosystem in which newly learned behaviors can be practiced, rewarded, and consolidated, rather than extinguished the moment a young person returns to their usual circle.

For juvenile justice policy, the findings argue against one-size-fits-all supervision. Case plans that focus exclusively on individual deficits, such as poor communication or impulsivity, may systematically underperform, particularly for the large share of supervised youth whose social networks are dominated by delinquent peers or marked by isolation. The data suggest a dual-track approach: build the skill and build the setting. Structured prosocial activities, mentorship programs, and deliberate peer-network interventions become not optional extras but core components of effective aggression reduction among high-risk youth. Systems that ignore the environmental half of the equation may be spending resources on skills that never get the chance to work.

The study also carries a message about resilience that resonates far beyond the juvenile justice system. Human capabilities are context-dependent, and the environments young people inhabit can either amplify or mute the protective factors they carry within them. For the thousands of justice-involved youth striving to desist from aggression, the path forward is not only internal transformation but external opportunity, the chance to belong to circles where better communication is met with connection rather than contempt. As this research demonstrates, skills need compatible environments to take root, and society’s willingness to cultivate those environments may determine whether its most vulnerable young people flourish or falter.

Subject of Research: How social circles moderate the effect of communication skills on aggression among justice-involved youth

Article Title: Skills Need Compatible Environments to Take Root: How Social Circles Shape the Effects of Communication Skills on Aggression Among Justice-involved Youth

Article References: Liu, L. (2026). Skills Need Compatible Environments to Take Root: How Social Circles Shape the Effects of Communication Skills on Aggression Among Justice-involved Youth. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09942-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09942-y

Keywords: justice-involved youth, communication skills, aggression, delinquent peers, prosocial peers, social circles, juvenile justice, community supervision, mentoring, social learning theory, peer influence, resilience