Yasser Payne grew up in Harlem, New York, where violence was all around him. A number of his family members and friends were shot. He himself was subject to gun violence and witnessed fights. And this ever-present threat meant that being a part of “the streets” was a common way of life, where people found identity, solace, and community within gangs or other criminal activity.  

“Street culture,” he explained in an interview with the Observer, is an “ideology centered on personal, social, and economic survival.” 

But when he went into social work and later into criminology and social psychology, Payne soon realized that perspectives from underserved, Black, and violent-stricken communities were missing or misrepresented. He wanted to change that narrative. He began to develop a research program and methodology to study and include the realities of street-identified Black Americans in academia. His first big, funded project landed him in Wilmington, Delaware, often cited as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. 

In a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, Payne, now a professor at the University of Delaware, and his colleagues zoomed into cannabis use in this population of street-identified Black Americans, a substance often used to help individuals cope with stress and other uncomfortable emotions. 

“Cannabis might be an option that you do have to help deal with the physical and emotional stress associated with living in a neighborhood where there’s so much gun violence,” said Naomi Sadeh, an associate professor at the University of Delaware and the first author of the new paper. The aim of the study was to see if cannabis use could alleviate physical or mental health risks that come with living in these extreme conditions. 

To untangle these relationships, the team used the Street Participatory Action Research approach (or Street PAR for short), developed by Payne and his colleagues, to collect data. This approach means training and equipping low-income, street-identified Black Americans with academic and research skills through a series of workshops. These Street PAR associates then are involved throughout the research process—from study design to data collection to activism. 

“From our perspective, we would have better theory, methods, and data, particularly, by incorporating justice-involved folk or street-identified folk in the research process,” Payne said.

For the new study, a total of 14 Street PAR associates collected over 350 blood pressure readings, as well as survey responses related to violence exposure, anxiety and depression symptoms, and cannabis use. Through a series of analyses, Payne, Sadeh, and their collaborators found that those who didn’t use cannabis to cope had higher blood pressure than those who did.  

“We can’t say why [because] it’s a cross-sectional study, but [cannabis] did seem to alter the relationship to some extent between violence exposure and blood pressure,” Sadeh said. She noted that blood pressure was also elevated across the board for street-identified folks when compared to population norms, likely linked to the high stress that these communities are under. 

However, for mental health, “we didn’t see what we expected,” Sadeh said. Instead of alleviating anxiety and depression, there was a stronger association between violence exposure and mental health distress when cannabis was used. In other words, people who used cannabis appeared to be more stressed with higher violence exposure than those who did not. This may be because cannabis is a short-term relaxer. “It doesn’t deal with the underlying problem,” Sadeh said. Cannabis doesn’t take away the stressors of living with violence, which can cause trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, or anxiety disorders. 

Highlighting the complicated role of cannabis, notably its potential benefit in cardiovascular health, may help pave the way to solutions. For instance, the paper advocates that in Delaware, where recreational marijuana was recently legalized, tax revenue from the sales of cannabis could be allocated to support violence-reduction programs. Similar policies have already been lobbied for in other states where cannabis has become legal. 

Incorporating street voices and continuing the Street PAR approach is another part of the solution. “Street PAR is a gun-violence intervention or outreach program,” Payne said. He explained that the approach provides street-identified folks with training, income, and research experience that could break the cycle of structural racism and incarceration, while also bringing a previously excluded, people-centered perspective to psychological research. 

“[Psychologists] need to play a greater role in really moving the literature forward, really getting [to] understand the street identity or street culture,” Payne said. “We’ve got to start thinking outside the box.” 

Reference 

Sadeh, N., Sanchez-Stevens, T., Payne, Y. A., Hitchens, B. K., & Bounoua, N. (2025). Violence exposure relates differently to blood pressure and emotional health as a function of cannabis use among street-identified Black Americans. Clinical Psychological Science.