Ibiza: Capital of Rave, Sex and Ecstasy
Spain (and Europe) turn a blind eye to MDMA central; it's good for business
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I wasn’t sure who were the dodgiest drug dealers openly serving up bucket-loads of ecstasy and cocaine in San Antonio, Ibiza, across the road from where I hawked tickets for the night club Amnesia. They came from all over Europe (and its dodgiest neighborhoods) and beyond: Naples wide boys, Andalusian pill heads, Moroccan smugglers, roadmen from Cardiff, and of course, Scousers, with the finest Liverpool accents.
It grabbed my attention that they didn’t fight over the turf but stood in a line, often advertising their wares to the lads in shorts and girls in bikinis. There was an endless stream of customers to go around and the dealers all made cash hand over fist.
The small Balearic island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain in the Western Mediterranean, has the world’s biggest concentration of clubs for rave, or electronic dance music; the venues include UNVRS (formerly Privilege), with capacity for a whopping 10,000 revelers, Amnesia, with space for another 5,000, the legendary Pacha, and dozens more. Not every clubber is high but a lot sure are. There are reasonable estimates that partiers collectively swallow 40,000 ecstasy pills a night, or about 3.7 million over the peak months of June, July and August.
In between this high season, Ibiza goes back to being a sleepy island with a few rich folk and the odd straggler living between fishing villages. In the summer, it’s rammed with tourists off their heads on pills and powders, pumping their fists in the air for days on end, topless foam parties by the sea at two pm, and, as the cocktail is called, sex on the beach.
I spent two months selling club tickets in Ibiza back in the summer of 1999, after I had been teaching English in Madrid and before I went to Mexico and started doing narco journalism. It’s a sight to behold. And rave tourism has only got bigger since, with the Ibiza ambulance service this month saying it risks collapse because of demands of ravers keeling over on bad trips.
Akin to Mexico (and the United States), there are regular busts of drug dealers in Ibiza but the drug trade carries on in plain sight. The owners of nightclubs and hotels are raking it in from rave tourism and don’t want to rock the boat. Tickets for club nights can hit 100 euros just to get through the door, which means a million on a night for Privilege even before you get to drinks and VIP tables. With the clubs making so much moolah, they are the financial power on the island like the casinos are in Las Vegas. They even…
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