A three-part documentary series entitled ‘Ibiza Narcos premieres today, Sunday, on Sky Documentaries. Combining documentary with drama, it chronicles the rise and fall of some of the smugglers and drug traffickers that brought LSD, ecstasy and cocaine to Ibiza during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and the attempts of the police to stem the tide of narcotics arriving and being sold mainly in clubs and discotheques. It also tells the stories of those whose non-stop partying got out of hand.
One of these people is Wayne Anthonya party promoter and one of the first to program raves on the island, where he arrived in 1988. “What Ibiza represented was a beautiful, hot, visually dazzling island. You could be as free as possible“, explains the Briton in the documentary.
At that time, when everyone pretended or felt very free on the island, it is when the drug gangs began to arrive in Ibizato supply clubbers with endless drugs. The growing dominance of these gangs is one of the central themes of ‘Ibiza Narcos’.
Wayne, one of the contributors to the documentary, was interviewed by Sky News ahead of its release. “I’m not going to sit here and say the cartels don’t exist in Ibiza. They are all there and have been there since the 1990s“, he assures. But he adds that most people try to ignore the organized crime going on around them.
Hallucinations with giant spiders
Although he describes Ibiza as his “homeland”, it was ultimately a bad experience with drugs which convinced Wayne that it was time to give it up.
He had been partying for days when he realized he had taken too many drugs. “I got on the phone to my friends in London and was saying, ‘I’ve gone mad – what can I do?’ One of them advised him to drink cough syrupa dangerous advice that he now says could have killed him.
Wayne tells Sky News, “I had the worst hallucination of my life. I ended up locking myself in the villa with all the blinds down. I was in a room with a baseball bat, with stuff piled up in the doorway to keep the giant spiders from entering the room“.
When his drunkenness wore off and the effect of the drugs consumed subsided, he realized that he had “come to the end” of his life of partying on the island.
“I never looked back. I never went back to using drugs. I stayed away from the club scene,” he says.
