A program in Amsterdam that pays alcoholics in beer to clean streets and parks is getting a lot of press in the U.S. There are some issues that are not being articulated explicitly elsewhere, particularly how this program serves bourgeois interests and fails to address addiction. To sum up the issue, I’ll draw from the New York Times article from December 4th, 2013 written by Andrew Higgins that you can read in full here. This is a program “to lure alcoholics off the streets by paying them in beer to pick up trash”. The New York Times states that the “The basic idea is to extend to alcoholics an approach first developed to help heroin addicts, who have for years been provided with free methadone, a less dangerous substitute, in a controlled environment that provides access to health workers and counselors”. More details of the program as described in the New York Times are as follows:

“In addition to beer — the brand varies depending on which brewery offers the best price — each member of the cleaning team gets half a packet of rolling tobacco, free lunch and 10 euros a day, or about $13.55. The program, started last year by the Rainbow Foundation, a private but mostly government-funded organization that helps the homeless, drug addicts and alcoholics get back on their feet, is so popular that there is a long waiting list of chronic alcoholics eager to join the beer-fueled cleaning teams…The idea of providing alcoholics with beer in return for work…was first tried in Canada. It took off in the Netherlands in part because the country has traditionally shunned “zero tolerance” in response to addiction. Amsterdam now has three districts running beer-for-work street cleaning programs, and a fourth discussing whether to follow suit. Other Dutch cities are looking into the idea, too.”

There are several problems with the actual program and its assumptions about alcoholism. The first problem with this is that it relies on a meaningful differentiation between types of alcohol, when in fact there is no such meaningful differentiation. The assumption of the program is that it is better to give these workers beer than have them not working and drinking liquor. Yet, the difference between an alcoholic drinking beer or liquor is not the same difference between a heroin addict using methadone or heroin.  Beer and liquor are the same drug with the same effect. Although there is a risk of overdose and spread of disease through alcoholism, it is not the same as heroin addiction. The risk of death from alcohol(ism) is very real but is not the same as the risk of death from heroin. This program is not the same as a heroin shooting gallery where addicts are injected with clean needles with a “safe” amount of heroin. When it comes to alcoholism there is no equivalent to giving out free needles, or a safe dosage. A can of beer is no more safe for an alcoholic than a shot of whiskey, and has no less alcohol in it. So then the real difference between a working beer drinker and a non-working liquor drinker is the labor they perform.

The district mayor of eastern Amsterdam, Fatima Elatik correctly argues that alcoholics “cannot be just ostracized” but argues it is better to “restrict their drinking to a limited amount of beer with no hard alcohol.” In this painfully unsustainable program “the cleaning teams are forbidden from drinking while out on the street, but…they get enough beer before they set out in the morning and during their lunch break to keep them going.” But if someone is an alcoholic they cannot simply choose to drink less for any extended period of time. The article quotes one of the workers, Ramon Smits, who “used to knock back a bottle and more of whiskey or rum each day but now sticks to beer, consuming five cans a day at work and then another five or so in his free time.” What this does is create a source of exploited labor for the duration an alcoholic person is able drink only a limited amount of beer a day, though ten cans is hardly limited. But to pay them in beer instead of wages they could use at their discretion is part of the assumed rationalization that they would buy liquor with wages and that drinking beer keeps them safer. This is part of a paternalistic and bourgeois ideology that allows these workers to be taken advantage of and paid an exploitative wage under the guise of helping them. We can see this in one of the worker’s claim that “[he’s] not proud of being an alcoholic, but [he is] proud to have a job again.”

The problem here is that the program acts like all active alcoholics are incapable of holding down jobs so that it makes sense for them to provide them with this low paid job. Under the pretense that they are doing a community service to keep alcoholics functioning as members of society, they completely ignore that many active alcoholics are very successful and functioning as very important members of society. Active alcoholics are doctors, lawyers, teachers, therapists, academics, journalists, politicians, actors, bus drivers, musicians, bankers, and any other career you could think of. It is a myth that helps to perpetuate class and racial inequalities among others, that alcoholics and addicts cannot function in society. Anyone, no matter what background or status, could be an alcoholic, and though anyone’s alcoholism could result in them being homeless and jobless, it does not result in that for everyone. There are many social factors that go into how this emerges. What this program does not do is address in any way the social problems that contribute to addiction, or more specifically who gets to recover, who can function in society while using and who cannot. Part of why we do not see this is because the most popular recovery program is premised on anonymity and many successful people have to “out” themselves as addicts or in recovery for anyone to ever know they were using while holding down prestigious and well paid jobs, for example, actress Kristen Johnston came out as an alcoholic and drug addict in her memoir. And although the actor Cory Monteith was public about his early recovery, no one knew he was using heroin and alcohol again until his death revealed it for him earlier this year. Programs like the one in Amsterdam reduce the complexity of addiction as a social problem and allow people to perpetuate misinformation about how addicted people live.

Addiction has been essentialized in that it is understood as part of an individual’s ontology, their being. If there is an ontology of addiction (which I’ll save for another post) there are social problems that contribute to it and to which people can still be functional while using and which people can go into recovery. These decisions are affected by race, class, gender presentation, sexuality, age, citizenship, (dis)ability, and neuro-(a)typicality as well as mental illness. The issue in Amsterdam seems to be most clearly a class issue and we can see this in the reasons for the origins of the program as described by the New York Times article:

“Locals in the heavily immigrant eastern district who used to curse alcoholics for turning the area’s main park, Oosterpark, into an unruly outdoor bar now greet them with smiles as they do their cleaning rounds, dressed in orange jackets and carrying bright yellow garbage bags. “This is not a beer project — it is a cleaning project,” said the district mayor, Ms. Elatik, adding that it had proved far more successful in keeping drunks out of Oosterpark than previous government initiatives. On a recent afternoon, there were just three people drinking in the park, instead of the dozens who used to gather there, she said. Until the beer-for-work program started, the authorities had tried to purge the park of drunks by banning alcohol there and stepping up patrols by security guards. But this only forced alcoholics to move to other parks in the area and led to fights with the guards. Mr. Schiphorst himself was detained after one such brawl. “It is easy to say, ‘Get rid of them and punish them,’ ” Ms. Elatik said. “But that does not solve the problem. “Maybe I’m a softy, but I am happy to be soft if it helps people. They are human beings with problems, not just a problem to be swept away.”

This program is less about alcoholics and more about cleaning up a park. Unlike what the district mayor says, these alcoholics are being doubly swept away in that they are now forced to sweep their addiction outside of the bourgeois gaze and represent themselves as smiles wrapped in orange jackets. One of the workers profiled in the Times story, Fred Schiphorst, is stated to be out of work due to both a back injury and chronic alcoholism which originated when he found his pregnant wife dead of an overdose. He told the Times “every day is a struggle…you may see these guys hanging around here, chatting, making jokes. But I can assure you, every man you see here carries a little backpack with their own misery in it”. The workers’ orange jackets function to cover the misery carried on their backs and serve as a class marker–an indicator of service to the bourgeois community without any potential to actually join. There is not room for everyone at the top, nor even at the middle. The alcoholics sitting in the park drinking all day function not only to highlight the problems with addiction but to call out the problems with bourgeois society and the limited options for success in capitalism. It is that calling out that is being addressed and redressed by this program–not the problem of alcoholism. Much like the heroin shooting galleries function to keep desperate addicts from stealing to feed their addiction, these reformist strategies to addiction serve the needs to bourgeois class interests and not the addicts.

It does this as it also reinforces the very problematic idea that if the alcoholics had just a little more self-esteem they would then have the will power to…well, actually, the program doesn’t get that far. The success of the program would be measured by these men continuing to clean streets for a low wage and beer. Ramon Smits “said the project had not only helped him cut down his daily alcohol intake but also raised his self-esteem. “It keeps me away from trouble, and I’m doing something useful,” he said. “I help myself, and I help my community”.” But how does his community help him? By keeping him drunk enough to accept low wages? Even if the program itself does provide counseling, or if Amsterdam provides different kinds of monetary resources in addition to the program, my concern is especially how articles about this story are being written, and read, around the United States given the even worse state of social programs in the United States. For example, the image file URL for a picture of the workers linked above (and here again) has the file name as “drunks1″. This reflects the impossibility for a program like this to actually instill pride and self-esteem in a long term and meaningful way that would change the lives of the individuals in the program, or deal with addiction on a social scale. I am reminded of Du Bois’ critique of Booker T. Washington’s politics because there can be no self-respect while counseling a silent submission to civic inferiority.

The alternative to these programs is not for the city to leave the alcoholics to drink themselves to death in the park as Hans Wijnands, director of the program would have it seem when he stated to the New York Times “It would be beautiful if they all stopped drinking, but that is not our main goal…You have to give people an alternative, to show them a path other than just sitting in the park and drinking themselves to death.” It is worth noting that his use of the term beautiful functions as a linguistic betrayal of this program’s true concerns, namely bourgeois aesthetics. As this story is blowing up in the U.S. news media outlets, it remains that this story is about a very small program in Amsterdam. Thus, I am more concerned with how it is going to be interpreted in the United States and how we will continue to deal with addiction as a society, where we currently criminalize addiction and put people in prison for being addicts. The American rhetoric of addiction, as with this program in Amsterdam, keep poor people poor through a mask of social altruism hiding the face of bourgeois interests that cause joblessness and homelessness in the first place.

References

Du Bois, W. E. B. 1996. “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”. The Souls of Black Folk. Penguin Classics.