You may want one when you see this:
"Alcoholics work for beer in Amsterdam program; Experiment tries to help addicts, improve areas" by Toby Sterling | Associated Press, January 19, 2014
AMSTERDAM — In a pilot project that has drawn attention in the Netherlands and around the world, the city has teamed up with a charity organization in hopes of improving the neighborhood and possibly improving life for the alcoholics. Not by trying to get them to stop drinking, but instead by offering to fund their habit outright.
What the hell have the Dutch been smoking?
Oh, yeah…. and now they are acting like a drunk buying rounds at the bar (many a night I came home with a few crumpled dollar bills in the pocket wondering how I could have spent all my money).
Participants are given beer in exchange for light work collecting litter, eating a decent meal, and sticking to their schedule.
Where can I sign up?
‘‘For a lot of politicians it was really difficult to accept, ‘So you are giving alcohol?’ ’’ Amsterdam East district mayor Fatima Elatik said. ‘‘No, I am giving people a sense of perspective, even a sense of belonging. A sense of feeling that they are OK and that we need them and that we validate them and we don’t ostracize our people.’’
In my experience I have kind of found that drunks ostracize themselves with their behavior.
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In practice, the men — two groups of 10 — must show up at 9 a.m., three days a week. They start off with two beers, work a morning shift, eat lunch, get two more beers, and then do an afternoon shift before closing out with their last beer. Sometimes there’s a bonus beer. Total daily pay package: $25, in a mix of beer, tobacco, a meal, and cash.
I counted a sixsh pack of beersh.
Seriously, they are chugging 'em at 9 a.m.? I was always told to at least wait until noon.
Participants say a lot of that cash also goes to beer.
To understand how this all came to be, it helps to know the background.
I'm shorry, ociffer, but I don't care. Jush want muh beer.
For years, a group of about 50 rowdy, aging alcoholics had plagued a park in east Amsterdam, annoying other park-goers with noise, litter, and occasional harassment.
Who would want to ostracize them? I swear from experience that excessive alcohol consumption by alcoholics never results in anything good.
Oh, man, this is turning into an AA meeting!
Hi, my name is…. almost thought you had me, didn't you?
The city had tried a number of hard-handed solutions, including adding police patrols, and temporarily banning alcohol in the park outright — including for family barbecues and picnics.
I like that last one.
You wanna see Americans get worked up take away their beer. Forget the looting of their wallets and destruction of their futures, forget about the bloody wars, you just take that bottle away! Out into the streets they will go! Hey, hey, ho, ho, prohibition's got to go!
Of cour$e, government isn't about to do that considering all the taxes they take from alcohol con$umption -- and now I $ee clearly through the haze of agenda-pu$hing promotion of drunkenne$$.
Elatik says the city was spending $1.3 million a year on various prevention, treatment, and policing programs to deal with the problem, and nobody was satisfied.
Meanwhile, the small nonprofit Rainbow Group Foundation and its predecessors had been experimenting with ways to get help for alcoholics and drug addicts in the area.
I gue$$ some experimentation is better (cough) than others.
Floor van Bakkum of the Jellinek clinic, one of the city’s best-known addiction treatment clinics, said her agency has a very different approach to treating alcoholism. She has a few reservations about the Rainbow program, but approves of it in general.
What kind of me$$age is that sending to KIDS?
She said a ‘‘harm reduction approach’’ makes sense only when there is no real hope of recovery for an alcoholic.
‘‘The Rainbow group tries to make it as easy as possible [for alcoholics] to live their lives and that they make as little as possible nuisances to the environment they are living in,’’ she said. ‘‘I think it is good that they are doing this.’’
Where are they sleeping it off?
Amsterdam has a storied history of pragmatic solutions to social problems — ideas that often seemed immoral at the time. Prostitution, now fully legal, has been tolerated here since the 1600s, when the city was a major port. Authorities designated a Red Light District where sailors could look for sex.
Here in AmeriKa there is simply too much law enforcement money and manpower involved keeping department and agency budgets phat, so the johns should just get used to it.
Marijuana use has been tolerated since the 1970s, when people realized street dealers were the main source of problems and authorities allowed weed to be sold in designated ‘‘coffee shops.’’
That's a real treat that the government is cracking down on(?).
Maybe they need to smoke something instead.
--more--"
So how is Holland's economy doing in this age of EU austerity and social service cuts?
Also see: Marijuana May Become Legal in Massachusetts
That's almo$t the la$t thing you want to do, I gue$$.
