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Hey, no one’s perfect…And we here at ACB know that better than most, having enthusiastically acted on more bad ideas than we care to think about. That said, there are some ideas out there that are so monumentally bad and so misguided as to boggle the mind – allowing us to declare “at least we didn’t come up with that!”
Welcome to the latest in our ongoing series of Bad Ideas in Brewing… and this one defies reason!
Many of the world’s cities have large homeless populations and many have their share of alcoholics and drug addicts who live in the streets. And now we learn from a report in Aljazeera that social workers in the German city of Essen have just launched a highly controversial program to incentivize the city’s alcoholics and drug addicts to clean the streets “in return for beer, tobacco, food, and small amounts of cash.”
This program, dubbed “Pick Up” by its organizers, was inspired by a Dutch project in Amsterdam that is also, not surprisingly, receiving its own share of heavy criticism. The German national newspaper, Die Welt, explains that teams of six street addicts and/or alcoholics will canvass the city’s streets collecting rubbish in return for “$1.50 an hour, a warm meal, and three bottles of beer after their shift.” The newspaper added that smokers are also afforded cigarettes – which we thought was a nice additional touch.
In what can best be seen as a feeble attempt to add an aura of academic legitimacy to this misguided campaign, NBC News is reporting that the “initiative will be monitored by a doctoral student from a local clinic who will take blood samples and other scientific data to track its impact on participants.”
Dare we ask what he expects to find out from monitoring this program’s participants?
Perhaps he will learn that these people are severely damaged by years of drug and alcohol abuse that led to them living in the streets. Perhaps his data might lead him to consider ‘that maybe the city shouldn’t be paying its homeless addicts with beer and tobacco.’ Just’ sayin’.
We’ve chronicled a lot of misguided ideas over the years in our Bad Ideas in Brewing Series. And every time we wrap one up, we’re pretty sure that it will be hard to best….
But we find the idea of paying those who have fallen victim to alcohol or drugs with beer and tobacco truly insidious – and don’t even want to joke about it.
