Amsterdam paid street-cleaning alcoholics in beer — streets clean, park crime down

The BBC reported in January 2014 on an Amsterdam project run by the Rainbow Group, a private but primarily government-funded company helping people coping with homelessness, drug abuse and alcoholism. Twenty chronic alcoholics worked 09:00 to 15:00 collecting litter, with extended breaks for beer, cigarettes and a hot lunch, all free; about 6,000 cans of beer stood stacked in crates in the garden shed that served as their base.

Project head Janet van de Noord: 'It's quite difficult to get these people off the alcohol completely. We have tried everything else. Now this is the only thing that works.' The streets around the group's base were litter-free, and since the programme started 12 months earlier, police had received fewer reports of stabbings and muggings in Oosterpark, where the men had previously congregated. Van de Noord framed it as cost-effective: arrests also cost society money, and the men were 'giving something back to society'.

Amsterdam's Jellinek anti-addiction clinic endorsed the logic as 'kind of harm reduction', comparable to carefully monitored methadone or heroin doses — while warning it needed monitoring so it wouldn't attract new alcoholics, and would be inappropriate for alcoholics who still held jobs and homes. Other Dutch cities were considering similar schemes.

Pay the city's chronic alcoholics in the currency they cannot refuse — supervised beer, cigarettes and lunch — for useful public work

It starts from an 'unchangeable reality': instead of demanding abstinence first and work later, it schedules the addiction inside a productive day.

The compensation is exactly calibrated to the workforce — 'I come for the beer. If there was no beer then why would I come?' — so recruitment costs nothing and attendance is reliable.

The benefits compound in three ledgers at once: cleaner streets, less park crime, and a structured day with pride ('we are not the garbage anymore') for men the system had written off.

It is supervised harm reduction, not a free bar: the clinic's methadone analogy gave it clinical cover, and the monitoring caveat kept it from becoming an open invitation.

When a behaviour can't be removed, redirect it: build the programme around the compulsion instead of against it, and even the payment can become the job's attraction.

A year in, the Rainbow Group was optimistic the results would attract more funding and let it 'reach the unreachable', and other Dutch cities were weighing copies of the scheme. The Rainbow Group declined to disclose how much government money went toward the beer, wary of negative publicity jeopardising funding.