Team spirits

AFTER THE FATAL events on Lansdowne Street following the American League pennant clincher a week and a half ago, Mayor Tom Menino threatened "drastic measures" to ensure that drunken "knuckleheads" outside Fenway Park during the World Series would not turn violent. Instead of imposing a curfew or calling in the National Guard, the mayor growled, he might invoke a state law never before used in Boston, one allowing him to ban the sale or distribution of alcohol "in cases of riot or great public excitement."

In the end, Menino didn't go that far -- a smart move, according to Eric Burns, host of the national weekend program "Fox News Watch" on the Fox News Channel and author of a recent social history of alcohol in America. "You can applaud the sentiment and understand why it has arisen in Boston this month, but it would be a kind of prohibition, and prohibition doesn't work," says Burns, whose 2003 book "The Spirits of America" (Temple), which covers everything from the plotting of the Revolutionary War over Caliboguses, Sillabubs, and other vile-sounding mixed drinks at Boston's Green Dragon Tavern to bootlegger Joseph P. Kennedy's recipe for watering down smuggled Canadian scotch, has just been published in paperback.

"You can't regulate people's tastes unless you can regulate the actual distribution of the product. And as a father of a college student in Boston, I know that even if you close down the bars in Kenmore Square, there are plenty of ways to get booze, whether you're under 21 or not," Burns said in a telephone interview. "Besides," he added in a more scholarly vein, "history shows that prohibition is not only ineffective, but that it leads to a profound disrespect for both the wisdom and efficacy of law."