Ibiza Town - At first glance, the beach looks idyllic, the kind of perfect Mediterranean summer scene that features in holiday brochures. Children frolic in a turquoise sea, watched over by mothers and fathers who sunbathe on sands as golden and soft as sugar.
Gracing the seafront at this upmarket resort in Ibiza is a string of luxury five-star hotels, where caviar is on the menus and Cristal champagne sells for £1 200 a bottle.
But look a little closer and an altogether more disturbing scenario emerges. A few hundred yards along the beach, a woman in her early 20s, clad in a bright orange bikini, approaches a group of young men standing in front of a popular beach club.
It’s the middle of the afternoon and they’re in plain sight of a security guard at the entrance of the bar, not to mention the children playing nearby. Making no attempt to hide what she’s doing, she hands over cash for a Clingfilm wrap, which one can only conclude contains drugs, most probably cocaine.
Meanwhile, a holidaymaker in red trunks is standing a few feet away from other sunbathers. He openly dips his finger into another man’s hand before rubbing a white powder — probably cocaine again — into his gums.
While Ibiza has long had a reputation as a hedonistic party destination, revellers have traditionally indulged in illegal drug taking in the darkened corners of unsavoury pubs and clubs. But when I visited, I was shocked to witness what appears to be a growing trend — drug abuse in broad daylight, near British children and families in the island’s tourist hotspots.
At the beach, I watch the men who’ve been selling suspicious packages counting handfuls of €20 (about R300) and €10 notes. A few feet away, another man and a blonde female appear to have brought their own supplies. Lounging on a towel, he breaks up a pill and drops it in halves into her bottle of beer.
It’s impossible to know exactly what the pill is, but it’s most likely to be MDMA, also known as ecstasy and one of the most popular drugs on Ibiza.
In recent years the Balearic island has become fashionable among middle-class families attracted by its glorious white beaches and apparently family-friendly ambience. More than two million tourists from the UK travel to Ibiza each summer, and they include Prime Minister David Cameron, who has holidayed here with his wife Samantha and their children.
While there are resorts, such as San Antonio, known to be popular with clubbers, other areas, including here in Playa d’en Bossa on the island’s south eastern coast, have become favourites for families. They come for the water parks, child-friendly restaurants and play parks which provide merry-go-rounds, bouncy castles and trampolines.
Thomson holiday brochures describe it as a resort where ‘kids can have as much fun as the grown ups’ before adding: ‘Even in the evenings there’s a family-friendly vibe — most pubs welcome kids.’
Yet, increasingly, families find themselves stumbling upon not just seedy, but often illegal activities, whether it’s inappropriate sexual behaviour or those openly taking mind-altering substances.
Most disturbing is the shameless use of illegal drugs such as cocaine, ketamine (a horse tranquilliser) and MDMA. It’s estimated 40 000 illegal pills are consumed a night on Ibiza at the height of the summer, and the island’s hospital treats some of the highest numbers of overdoses of any holiday destination in the world.
In the past year, 72 Britons have been arrested or detained on the island for drug-related offences, while 61 have ended up in hospital.
Local authority figures show the number of drug seizures on the Balearic Islands rose from 14 253 in 2012 to 18 640 last year.
Liz and Glen Avis and their two children — six-year-old Ruby and ten-year-old Gabriella — are holidaying at Playa d’en Bossa.
The family, from Ipswich, is staying at a cost of £800 per person at the all-inclusive four-star Hotel Club Bahamas, which they booked through Thomson and chose because of child-friendly activities offered by the hotel, and its location near the beachfront.
But within moments of arriving at their luxury hotel the family was exposed to the island’s increasingly visible darker side.
Mrs Avis, 44, a stay-at-home mother whose husband is an investment manager, says: “We got into the hotel quite late but the children were excited and wanted to have a quick look at the beach.
“But when we got there we saw a completely naked girl and man who were obviously fondling each other.
“The girl, who couldn’t have been more then 20, looked ill. She was swaying and looked dazed. She appeared to be high on drugs. It is not something you want to see on holiday with your young children.”
Since then they have become increasingly concerned by the scenes they have witnessed on the beach where their children play. “Today, there were people acting very shifty on the sun loungers next to us and the girl next to me was sniffing something,” says Mrs Avis.
“We know Ibiza is famous for clubs, but we had no idea drug-taking went on in the cold light of day close to hotels which sell themselves as family-orientated.”
Just how blatant drug use has become is illustrated later when I meet a 27-year-old British holidaymaker who works in a senior position for a large company and lives in an affluent Berkshire village. The privately-educated man, who asked to be identified only as Adam, bragged of snorting a line of cocaine out of his friend’s hand.
“I couldn’t have been in a more open place, but ‘when in Rome’,” he confesses, adding: “It was easy to get drugs. We bought cocaine and MDMA off a British girl working as a promoter in San Antonio.”
Meanwhile, in Bossa, which is home to the famous Bora Bora beach club, one Spanish club promoter told me: “I’ve just seen a British man do a line of cocaine on a sun lounger. It is like the tourists think it is legal, but it is not.”
British model Amber-Rose Smith, 20, travelled to Ibiza with a friend and planned to work as a waitress for the summer season.
Amber-Rose, from Hackney, East London, was shocked to find the tourism industry infested with drugs, and admits some of her new friends and colleagues openly dealt in illicit substances.
“There were people who arrived on the island at the same time, and like me they said they would never be involved with drugs,” she says.
“But slowly, one by one, I saw more and more people being dragged into taking and dealing cocaine and other drugs to get by financially. I would come home and my flatmates, who were well-spoken, privately-educated and very middle-class, would be out of it on ketamine.”
Amber-Rose ended up working in a bar where she was paid just €35 for a six-hour shift while her friend was a waitress earning the same for 12 hours work.
“A lot of other people were earning very little so started dealing drugs to make ends meet,” she says.
For Amber-Rose, the last straw came when her friends wrecked their apartment in San Antonio after getting high. She ended up coming home just two months into the five-month stint she had planned. She has been travelling to Ibiza for five years and believes drug use has become more brazen as nothing is done to clamp down on it.
She says: “People who go to Ibiza are often regulars — the more they see that they are not getting in trouble, the braver they become about doing drugs in public. I’ve been offered drugs while eating in nice, family friendly restaurants with young children sitting at the next table.”
A walk along the Bossa resort’s main strip, Carrer de la Murtra, reveals that everyone — from Spanish bar staff to Senegalese street sellers and British club promoters — appears to be dealing drugs.
And many clubs, bars and hotels are turning a blind eye. A Spanish waitress working in a bar in Bossa, where a bottle of water costs €12, openly offers to sell me cocaine over the bar with my drink.
A maid, who works at a five-star hotel, tells me she is often expected to remove the remnants of drug abuse from rooms.
The strip is packed with families eating in pricey restaurants. Yet a chorus of African, Spanish and British accents mumble “Charlie”, slang for cocaine, “Ket” (ketamine) and “MDMA” as we walk along.
Well-spoken and smartly-dressed Spanish and British tourists sit on the side of the street rolling marijuana joints before smoking them as they walk past restaurants where families are eating their lunch, the pungent stench hanging in the air.
Despite the clear evidence found by the Mail, the Spanish authorities are reluctant to admit there’s a drug problem. A spokesman for Ibiza’s Guardia Civil — an arm of the police — initially said: “I’m telling you there is no problem with drugs to speak of. None at all.”
But another later admitted: “It’s obvious there are drugs in Ibiza. Where there’s demand there’s always going to be supply. The Guardia Civil always acts where officers see or suspect wrongdoing.
“We would of course welcome any material your newspaper has gathered showing evidence of illegal activity so we can try to act on it.”
In recent years, there have been several British deaths on the island which have been linked to drugs. Janine Mallett, 31, a mother-of-two, drowned in San Antonio after taking a cocktail of illegal substances last July. In September, Gillian Moore, 37, took MDMA before collapsing from a heart attack.
There’s no doubt a drugs culture has infiltrated every level of the island’s tourist industry, and it is nigh on impossible to shield children from it. Souvenir shops offer “ket spoons” — a tiny metal spoon attached to a necklace that’s used to snort the powder — alongside Ibiza fridge magnets, key rings and other trinkets.
A Bossa shop displays T-shirts promoting drugs, using Disney characters. One shows Snow White snorting a line of cocaine and the words “Ibiza Clubbers”.
A British girl, no more than six, spots the T-shirt and pointing it out to her mother, she asks: “What’s Snow White doing?” Her mother ushers her away. One doesn’t envy her having to supply the answer. - Daily Mail