Spin Magazine Identifies Ibiza’s Dark Heart
Ibiza girls arrested in Peru- click for more
US music magazine Spin published a hard-hitting expose of Ibiza’s ‘Seedy Side’ this week, angled around the cocaine related arrests of two Brit girls in Peru who allegedly became involved in crime after moving to Ibiza for the summer.
Identifying a ‘tawdry subculture where young people working as bartenders, dancers, and flyer-distributing “PR girls” rack up enormous debts on the island and are strongarmed into serving as small-time dealers or smugglers for local criminal organizations’. Spin writer Philip Sherburne quizzed sociologist Daniel Briggs on his views of the island.
Recently completing a book about young Brits on the island (‘Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza’), Briggs set out to reveal ‘the ugly truth about ‘how’ and ‘why’ young Brits get involved in ‘drug use, drug dealing, violence, prostitution, and injury’ by spending time with holidaymakers in San Antonio.
Publishing company Palgrave promise ‘the book represents the first attempt to step inside the holiday experience of young British tourists’ with delinquency being ‘subtly guided and endorsed by the commodified social context of resorts which are only interested in making money at their expense.’ (Palgrave: http://bit.ly/1dvDh5y )
Chatting to Spin this week, the 30 something writer was blunt about some of the behavior he encountered.
“Having sex with prostitutes, basically asking lapdancers to piss and shit on them, shitting off balconies, shitting into bottles and mixing it with water and throwing it at each other, jumping off balconies. Basically, very extreme drug taking,” he reported.
“They (Ibiza authorities) claim to distance themselves from these behaviors — the image of drugs and crime and drug-dealing — but to be honest, it’s so incestuously embedded in the island’s economy, without that kind of expenditure, the island would go down,” he also suggested, “It wouldn’t survive. It would go bankrupt.” (Spin: http://go.spin.com/180zVlk )
The Guardian, meanwhile, published a similarly bleak assessment of Ibiza’s ‘increasingly darker side’ this week, in a report headlined ‘nothing is innocent and dealing is normal’ in which they asked UK house legend Terry Farley for his views on Ibiza’s contemporary club scene.
“The VIP culture has ruined the island for everyone,” the Boys Own UK house legend declared, “apart from investment bankers and drug dealers.” (Guardian: http://bit.ly/148WMxt )
Expert local reporter Danny Kay defended Ibiza robustly, however, suggesting the ‘majority of the journalists writing these so called reports, have little or no experience of the island and its culture’ in a blog posting headlined ‘Ibiza- Not All About Drugs’.
The always well informed Tripadvisor Ibiza insider also admitted, however, that San Antonio ‘has a serious problem’ and advised town authorities to ‘clean up the filth there’ urgently.
“The recent negative publicity for the resort should be the wake up call for the local community to say enough is enough,” he added.
“It’s time to get rid of the drug dealers, looky looky men, theifs, and prostitutes that prey on naive tourists. As it’s a small island, the local police know exactly who they are and where to find them,” he said. http://bit.ly/175pspT
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
