Vintage year to create fear

I'm staying home this weekend. It's too dangerous to go out.

If I drive downtown to meet friends for dinner, I might get raped in the parking garage. If I zip out for a quart of milk, I could run into loitering teenagers waiting for Election Day and the chance to score an illegal bottle of wine at the local mini-mart.

Never mind that I am no more likely to be raped this month than I was last month, or that teen agers prefer beer and vodka to wine. Fear does not have to be rational to be real. Public-policy decisions, however, should be.

In a campaign season rife with distortion and fear-mongering, the liquor lobby in Massachusetts wins the local prize for scariest Halloween costume. They have dressed up greed to look like Officer Friendly.

The liquor and beer interests are bankrolling opposition to Question 1 on the ballot, which would allow local communities to decide whether to sell wine in their supermarkets. In menacing television ads, these interests frame the vote as a public-safety issue. More wine outlets mean more underage drinking and more drunken-driving deaths, the argument goes.

The lack of evidence for those claims could explain why Mothers Against Drunk Driving has taken no position on the matter. Thirty-four other states, including neighboring New Hampshire, allow consumers to buy a bottle of wine in the same place they buy a loaf of bread, without disastrous effect. Why not here?

Money is why. Why would liquor stores willingly surrender the near-monopoly they have enjoyed for 72 years in Massachusetts? Competition is good for consumers, but not so good for a package store's bottom line. The liquor lobby is not wrong to suggest that if grocery stores are allowed to sell wine this year, they will be back in the near future asking to sell beer, too. Why not?

The answer from opponents is that convenience- and grocery-store clerks are not trained to recognize a fake identification card or savvy enough to catch an underage poseur. Training would be a good idea for new wine outlets, but when did package stores become impenetrable to teenagers looking for hooch? Law enforcement stings regularly catch package stores illegally selling alcohol to minors.

Where the liquor industry goes off the rails is suggesting to voters that every mini-mart in Massachusetts will be hawking pinot grigio if we lift the prohibition on grocery-store chains owning no more than three liquor licenses. The ballot question explicitly retains local control of the awarding of liquor licenses. The state's 351 cities and towns will not be issuing them without due deliberation. It is worth remembering that there are still dry towns in Massachusetts, where the sale of alcohol of any kind is banned.

The liquor industry cannot be faulted for acting in its self-interest. Grocery chains are lobbying just as aggressively in favor of Question 1. But what is particularly cynical about the liquor industry's ads is the exploitation of private grief for personal profit. Ron Bersani, grandfather of the 13-year-old drunken-driving victim for whom Melanie's Bill was named, is welcome to share his views on grocery-store sales of wine. If a drunk driver killed a child I loved I would not stop at Question 1; I would back legislation shutting down package stores, bars, and restaurants, too.

One does not have to question Ron Bersani's sincerity to note the irony of his sharing the State House steps at a recent press conference with legislators who initially opposed the tough provisions in Melanie's Bill cracking down on repeat drunk drivers, which Bersani fought so hard to enact. Senator Robert Creedon, the Democrat from Brockton who cochairs the Legislature's Joint Committee on Judiciary, and Senator Michael Morrissey, a Quincy Democrat, are now converts to the public-safety dangers of alcohol, parroting the liquor industry's bromides about the dangers of "convenience-store" wine sales. Politics as usual.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.