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It's the festive season again and the campaign against booze bingeing is heating up one more time. In a move intended to outsmart retailers, the Public Health Ministry has banned alcoholic drinks in gift baskets put on display anywhere. Drunk drivers, for the umpteenth time, have been warned that the authorities mean business this time around. Threats have also been made against liquor companies trying to side step the restrictions on advertising. Will all these measures achieve the major goal of reducing liquor-related deaths? We all shall see.

Traffic laws will be strictly enforced during the holiday period. Each year, road accidents kill at least 12,000 people and injure 100,000, which costs the state around Bt240 billion. We don't know the real ratio of drunk driving and accidents related to them. But with casualties running so high, the real number of people who drive while under the influence must be staggering.

Authorities have warned that this time, violators will be arrested immediately and subjected to prosecution within 48 hours. Convicted violators will be fined between Bt5,000 and Bt20,000 and have their driver's licence suspended for six months or forever for repeat offenders. These measures are being tried out at Bangkok's Thung Maha Mek Police Station, where drunk driving violations are the most frequent and cause more casualties than other crimes.

On the battlefront against advertising, the Alcohol Watch Network has accused a list of leading alcohol firms, including a major beer brewer, of flouting advertising regulations under the Alcohol Control Act, which came into effect a year ago. The act bans all forms of alcohol advertising, with very limited exceptions like live broadcasts from abroad. Breaches of the ban in print, television, radio, digital and outdoor media carry a penalty of up to one year in jail, a maximum fine of Bt500,000 or both.

A Bt500,000 penalty is unlikely to deter an industry worth perhaps a million times that amount. But the fact that alcohol ads have increased in the past year despite the threat of a jail term is mind-boggling. Harder still is how to fight a deep-rooted national habit where drinking is concerned. With or without the persuasive power of advertising, Thais have been consuming liquor with absolute abandon, and while the anti-drunk driving campaign has made some people become cautious, enforcement of the law is still nowhere near adequate.

So, the cat-and-mouse game between authorities and liquor ad makers has to be backed up by tough cops and unyielding roadblocks. It's pointless to hunt down violators of the ad rules while most drinkers don't even care to watch TV on Friday night in the first place. Banning liquor display in a gift basket might be good publicity for the crusaders, but the battle can never be won on the shelves or TV screens or in the advertising space of newspapers.

Last but not least, if liquor is a demon, it must be laughing at the way its enemies come feebly to life every time Thais celebrate Songkran or the New Year. With everyone from Cabinet members to construction workers drinking their nights away at every opportunity and giving traffic police a bottle of Mekong whiskey as a present, this demon can live with an occasional drop in sales.

Thailand needs to do a lot more to seriously combat the liquor menace. The entire nation will have to change old habits. That is almost a mission impossible.