Celebrity drug display on social media and its influence on youths’ substance abuse in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

Recently, the heightened drug misuse among youths have been seriously linked with the
social media, and some of the activities youths encounter on the social networking platforms.
Evidences in literature provide further proofs that young population can be influence by
what they see regularly online. In order to investigate this trend in relation to the reality
among Lagos youths, this study examined the drug display of Nigerian celebrities and how
that may potentially influence youths to embrace substance abuse. Three research questions
were designed to know if youths are familiar with celebrity drug displays in Nigeria; to
ascertain if celebrity online drug displays could make youths normalize substance abuse;
and to know the level of influence such may have on youths in Nigeria. The study was
anchored on the social influence theory. The cross-sectional survey design through the use
of online questionnaire was adopted to reach a sample of 385 in four tertiary institutions
in Lagos State, using the RDS technique. The data was presented and analyzed using
descriptive analysis. The results show that all the respondents agreed that some celebrity
engage in illicit drug displays on social media. And about 97% of the respondents are ardent
followers of some of these celebrities. Also, 68.6% of the surveyed respondents claimed that
youths could be influence to abuse drug through their exposure to online drug misuse. The
findings further show that 57.4% claims the actions of celebrities displaying drugs online
are deliberate, as they are known to smoke weed (Indian hemp), Shisha (Hookah) cigarette,
heavy alcohol and other claim that they support and comments boldly on posts encourage
drug addictions. in view of these, the research recommends strict sanctions against online
drug displays, public sensitizations against drug abuse and banning of celebrities abusing
drugs online.