From escape to seeking: understanding drug tourists

ABSTRACT Studying the relations between travel, daily life, and drugs will help understand why these tourists use drugs. Hence, the article aims to explore the social behaviors that shape the reasons and causes tourists to use drugs while traveling to a destination. For this purpose, unstructured interview and participant observation techniques were used in the study, applying the ethnography research approach. In this context, data were collected in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey as drug destinations between 2016 and 2020. Accordingly, while drug use in daily life is for escaping from daily life and recreational purposes, drug use while traveling occurs within the pursuit of happiness. As a result of their pursuit of happiness, drug tourists (as neo tribes) engage in social behaviors such as building strong social relations, feeling a sense of freedom, being in an entertaining atmosphere, and living the local culture. As a result, drug tourists see travel as a process from escape to seeking.