editor’s letter september 2013
This is an early Editor’s letter but the shocking news about Ibiza that has been circulating around the world lately is really breaking my balls.
A dozen or more English newspapers and even some American ones have been full of the story about two girls breaking bad in Ibiza, especially in San Antonio where they started working as “PR’s”, getting involved in some nasty stuff including drugs to then get “hired” by some guy to fly off to Lima to bring back even more drugs to Ibiza where they finally get caught at Lima airport with eleven kilos of Cocaine.
Now comes the “funny” part – all the papers claim that these two girls got dragged into something because of Ibiza, the island is the demon in this story. This is where it all began and the poor innocents were turned into mules smuggling Coke worth several million Euros in some Quaker Oat packets. The girls themselves declare they were kidnapped and forced by a gang to serve as mules to bring drugs to Ibiza…
Strange though that the guy that supposedly “hired” them goes by the name of “The Cockney” – sounds very Ibiçencan, doesn’t it? And the gang that supposedly kidnapped them comes from South America…
Let’s cut the shit, San Antonio is no Heaven on Earth but if you walk through the streets in January it is such a peaceful and quiet town. Only in the summer does it fill up with all sorts of people who mainly come from another island, up in the north, called the United Kingdom. You can be sure that up there there are other towns that wouldn’t be called Heaven on Earth either, as there are in every country all over the planet.
Ibiza is one of the global party capitals in the summer – there are more than 400 bars and small clubs and 7 of the best discotheques in the world. If anybody says there is nothing going on then they are a terrible liar. But I can tell you after living 17 years in Ibiza, that it is the same here as everywhere, and for the amount of lunatics that run free here surprisingly little is happening. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” so everybody who comes here should better be aware of themselves. If you have an unstable character you should maybe consider going on holiday somewhere else, and don’t even consider trying to make a living down here if you are disoriented. One more great quote is “he who searches will find” – sounds better in German but I hope you get the point…
In another article I described our living down here quite adequately, you can read it here
Daniel Briggs has written a book called “Deviance and risk on holiday – an Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza” (find it here), telling a cruel story about young Brits breaking bad in Ibiza, but he also claims that the problem lies in their home country, being a lost generation in search of the Holy Day. And, as one of the critics says, “The book tells us part of where we are in the aftermath of the orgy of globalisation” (Guy Standing, University of London, UK). Daniel Briggs is a Reader in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of East London, UK. He is also the author of “Crack Cocaine Users: High Society and Low Life in South London” (2012), editor of “The English Riots of 2011: A Summer of Discontent” (2012) and co-author of “Assessing the Use and Impact of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders” (2007), so he knows what he is talking about and, as you just read, he does not only point to Ibiza.
There have been a lot of shit articles about Ibiza in the past few years trying to blur the image towards this drug frenzy hell that the sensationalist press so love to talk about as it raises the number of dumb readers. The truth is Ibiza is no better or worse than any other party capital on the planet when it comes down to drugs, but this island is so much more than that. Everybody should find out for themselves what Ibiza is all about.
