{"id":1007,"date":"2014-03-31T07:12:04","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T07:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolsociology.net\/SOAN324WP\/?p=1007"},"modified":"2017-08-01T18:52:34","modified_gmt":"2017-08-01T18:52:34","slug":"paying-alcoholics-in-beer-good-or-bad-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/?p=1007","title":{"rendered":"Paying Alcoholics in Beer? Good or Bad Idea?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight, I was talking to my dad about this class, and he told me about a program he’d heard of in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This article<\/a>\u00a0from BBC News does a very good job of explaining the program. Basically, a company (The Rainbow Group) partially funded by the Dutch government have started a program to help homeless alcoholics in Amsterdam. The article describes how the program works: “They arrive at 09:00 and work until 15:00. They take extended breaks for beer, cigarettes and a hot lunch, all provided free of charge.” The aim of the program is not to fix these people, but to give them a better quality of life, while bettering the neighborhoods at the same time. Though this is a very controversial program that I imagine most Americans would not take seriously, I think it’s a very intriguing idea. The program seems to be helping to keep violence to a minimum and has been fairly cost effective. The people involved in the program are given a sense of dignity because they can work for their beer instead of begging for money. One of the men stated that “‘They used to treat us like garbage – and now we are picking up their garbage, we are not the garbage anymore.'” Rather than trying to change the “unchangeable reality” of alcoholism, this project is aimed at creating a better environment for alcoholics to live in.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure about this program and its effectiveness, but I think that the change of thinking about these types of things is a good start to changing society. As the article states, why not “abandon ‘old-fashioned political correctness'” and try something “crazy” like this?<\/p>\n

What do you think about this type of program? Do you think it would work in America? Is it making a significant difference?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight, I was talking to my dad about this class, and he told me about a program he’d heard of in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This article\u00a0from BBC News does a very good job of explaining the program. Basically, a company (The Rainbow Group) partially funded by the Dutch government have started a program to help homeless … Continue reading Paying Alcoholics in Beer? Good or Bad Idea?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25,19,15,5,17,22,16,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-being-poor","category-gov-programs","category-homelessness","category-news-link","category-organizations","category-people","category-poverty","category-solutions-homeless","category-solutions-hunger"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p47OlK-gf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mcguire-spickard.com\/SOAN324WP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}