A German city will be launching a controversial project on Wednesday aimed at encouraging alcoholics and drug addicts to perform menial cleaning jobs by paying them with beer, tobacco, food and a small amount of cash, Breitbart reported. Around 1.8 million people in Germany are alcoholics, up by 36 percent from 1.3 million in 2006, a study by a Munich health research institute released last January showed.
The taxpayer funded pilot project, dubbed "Pick Up," is being tested with 10 homeless addicts in a dilapidated area around the central railway station of the industrial western city of Essen, according to The Local.
In a move that has sparked intense outrage and controversy, the initiative, planned by charity Addict Support Essen, 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, while volunteers sweep streets and collect rubbish three to six hours a day in exchange for beer along with cigarettes, food, medical treatment and $1.50 an hour, NBC News reported.
"We want to use these incentives to bring back a routine for these people and provide additional care at our facilities," Baerbel Marrziniak from Suchthilfe Direkt, a community organization aimed at helping addicts, told NBC News.
Inspired by a Dutch project in Amsterdam, the "cheap labor" project has been labeled as dehumanizing by one aid group for the homeless, reported the Die Welt newspaper.
"This is not about the human being, as officials claim," said Horst Renner, who works at a homeless charity in the nearby city of Krefeld. "The city wants to get the homeless out of public sight."
However, Marrziniak argued that the scheme aims to reintegrate into society the most severe addicts of multiple substances, usually hard drugs and alcohol. "For the participants it is about a meaningful daily structure, feeling useful and learning a new way to behave."
"Its primary aim is 'harm reduction' for people not yet able or willing to go fully abstinent, to discourage them from consuming harder alcohol and to bring them into closer contact with social and medical services," according to Agence France-Presse.
"Those taking part will be mostly long-term unemployed and heavily addicted people for whom therapies have failed, who have health problems and are 'socially isolated and stigmatized,' the group said in a statement."
On Tuesday the charity released a statement saying that the "pickup" will be voluntary and targeted at Essen's long-term alcoholics, adding that the beer would just be "a means to an end."
