Drug tourism motivation of Chinese outbound tourists: Scale development and validation

Drug-taking behaviours have been extensively studied in psychology, behavioural science and health studies, yet, limited effort has been invested in understanding the factors that motivate tourists to engage in drug tourism. Given the increasing numbers of tourists who are exposed to commercially available cannabis in overseas destinations, developing a measurement scale for their motivation offers an effective tool to understand drug tourists more comprehensively. Using samples of Chinese outbound tourists who travelled to Amsterdam for consuming commercial cannabis, this study adopted a mixed methods approach and collected two rounds of quantitative data for scale development and empirical test. The results suggested a six-factor motivation scale: spiritual and emotional healing; social prestige; relaxation and escape; cannabis authenticity; commercial cannabis availability; and, cannabis experimentation. The resulting measurement scale demonstrated accepted reliability and validity. Findings further indicated that commercial cannabis availability is the strongest motivation for predicting drug tourists' future behavioural intention.