It's just a lollipop but it seems to do some good.
At the St John Ambulance late-night tent near the clubs and pubs in Civic, gaggles of raucous revellers stop and dip their hand into the bucket - and pull out a lolly.
They pause and totter on, lolly in hand and mouth. They giggle as they go, drinking water from the bottles that come with the lolly. They seem calmer (and the water may help on the morning after the night before).
The lollipop is one of the "weapons" St John Ambulance uses in a scheme to keep vulnerable people safe - and to stop high jinks turning to crime.
Teams of volunteers walk the streets with the aim of preventing revelry landing people in trouble, either for themselves or others. A hangover is one thing. A night in the cells or an emergency department quite another.
The lollipops also help when a volunteer on patrol dishes them out near the pubs.
"It creates a rapport," volunteer patroller Guy Archibald said.
"It's also one less drink and it helps people rehydrate because with the lolly comes a bottle of water."
The patrols fan out around midnight from a tent near the bus interchange in Civic. They wear uniforms but conspicuously not uniforms like those of the police or authority.
The tent itself contains first aid equipment - and a bucket of lollies.
There are also seats and buckets for the consequences of excess drink. Above all in the tent, there is an air of calm and safety.
The police approve.
"This program frees up police resources," Commander Rohan Smith said.
He sees the issues of the streets late at night as primarily about health and not crime - drunk people who are vulnerable.
The volunteers can deal with these less serious situations, leaving the police to deal with more serious ones, he thinks.
Similarly, some simple treatment in the St John Ambulance tent for over-indulgence means no ambulance is required later.
But the scheme is now under threat. The organisers believe the ACT government is looking for cheaper options.
"I think it's disappointing that the government strives towards the lowest dollar outcome rather than the best service values," the St John chief executive in the ACT, Adrian Watts, said.
He fears that, in a tendering process, the cheaper options might not involve patrols of young volunteers who have a rapport with people their own age.
A tent by itself without the roving volunteers wouldn't be effective, he thinks.
Volunteers like Liz Milne who had one life as a public servant and now, at the age of 60, is training as a nurse.
She says she is not a late-night person but she still goes out with two others from 9.30pm to 2.30am to deal with whatever late-night Canberra throws at them.
"You're out in the wild. I've been sitting in a pool of blood on a side-walk - I'm not going to do that in a hospital," she said.
"It really tests your resources and problem-solving skills."
The team do not go near potential violence. Their task is to help people on their way and to help them if they are in difficulty.
"We don't get involved in violent situations. We stand at a safe distance," volunteer Guy Archibald, 19, said.
If drunks get aggressive in the tent, they are asked to leave.
The team leader in this patrol is Caleb Naumann who is 24. He said patrols liaise with the police and the ambulance service so that more serious situations are then dealt with by the right professional agency.
There's a focus on women. Commander Smith said that the St John Ambulance people had intervened when there was what he described as a "vulnerable lady with a bloke standing above her and her skirt up above her waist".
"It's about looking at how to deescalate situations," Lauren Anthes, of Women's Health Matters, said.
"It's volunteers who are trained to spot problematic behaviour and intervene to prevent things getting out of hand," she said.
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