Abeeb Olufemi Salaam graduated with First Class Honours in Counseling Psychology and Political Science from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He received his first Masters degree in Counselling Psychology (Remedial and Reformatory Counselling option) from the same university before he proceeded to the Liverpool School of Psychology for his second Masters degree in Addictive Psychology, sponsored by the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission in the United Kingdom. Upon completion of his programme at the Liverpool School of Psychology, he was re-nominated for another Commonwealth Scholarship tenable at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom, where he is currently a research student working on psychosocial risk factors, substance involvement and the trajectory of criminal offending in Nigeria. His study is informed by a lack of statistical evidence to establish the extent to which various risk factors could lead to substance misuse and offending behaviour among the offender population in Nigeria. In bridging this gap, two major groups were recruited for the study. These were youth gangs (area boys and yan-daba) and offenders in selected prisons across the country. He hopes that the findings of this study may signal a critical need to develop effective policies relating to health, crime and drug prevention policies and programmes in Nigeria. However, before he travelled to Nigeria to collect the data to inform his study, he conducted a pilot study on the patterns of and motivation for drug and alcohol use among the Black African minorities in the United Kingdom.
