Following the third meeting of the Alcohol Consumption Control Committee yesterday, Mongkol said the ministry would also launch internal regulations to have its offices alcohol free nationwide and set up regional centres to gather complaints and train some officials to act as a "mini FBI" to ensure regulation enforcement.

The nine national measures included a push to hike the tax on rice whiskey and beer, a prohibition on dutyfree alcohol drinks and a separation of alcohol drink products from the Free Trade Agreement list, according to Mongkol.

The minister said he believed the tax measures would be more effective than the alcohol advertising ban as worldwide studies came to the same conclusion: ad bans prevent new drinkers but tax measures affected all groups.

The second measure is to reduce people's access to alcohol by pushing for a limit of alcoholic drinks production and distribution licence issuing and placing warning pictures on alcohol drink labels.

 The determination to control alcohol advertising  and eventually be totally rid of advertising  was listed as the third measures, while the fourth vowed to push forward the Alcohol Control Act for implementation.

The fifth is to establish alcoholism clinics inside provincial and district hospitals. The sixth is to support the usage of alcohol tax money in campaigns to reduce alcohol consumption and prevent problems stemming from drunkenness.

The seventh is to push for alcohol controls to be an important policy of provincial and local administrations and the eighth to support the antialcohol campaigns and alliance networks. The ninth measure is to support the research and knowledge management to support alcohol control measures and evaluate the already implemented ones.  

Mongkol said statistics from the year 1999 to 2001 found that within those two years, Thai people had elevated their beerdrinking rank from 102nd to the 85th in the world  while their whiskeydrinking rank moved from sixth to fifth.

Alcohol drinking was also in the top three causes of death in Thailand, he said, adding that the Central Institute of Forensic Science reported that most people killed in road accidents were found with high amounts of alcohol in their blood.

The Nation