Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

This paper provides an innovative “ground up” interpretation of the lived experience of illicit drug use amongst young, British tourists on the Balearic island of Ibiza, the global capital of electronic dance music. Based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken on the island over three summers, it is argued that Bryman’s (2004) framework of Disneyization can be used to theorise the differential normalisation of illicit drugs within the Ibiza “tourist bubble.” The experiential, bounded party spaces of the island immerse young, British tourists within a heavily narrativised theme-park-like atmosphere offering a multitude of temporal pleasures of hedonistic excess. The paper challenges dominant political and criminological ideology that consistently and simplistically represents drug use in such spaces as inherently senseless and pathological. Instead, it is argued that young people’s choices about intoxication emanate from a complex entanglement of agency, pleasure, and Disneyized structure. As such, findings indicate that the Disneyization framework can be employed to understand young people’s drug use in a range of immersive bounded leisure spaces, including tourist resorts and music festivals.