Just Say No

ED: Towards the end of that interview, Isaac Campos mentioned that, by the 1970s, states had begun loosening marijuana laws. Well, this regulatory shift reflected a larger cultural one. Reefer madness was out. Cheech and Chong were in.

PETER: It was around this time, 1976 to be precise, that a woman in Atlanta named Marsha Schuchard made a little discovery.

EMILY DUFTON: So she discovered her 13-year-old daughter was smoking marijuana and was incredibly upset by it, very frightened by it, and was the first person to gather a group of parents together, and to take a stand.

PETER: This is Emily Dufton, an historian at George Washington University. We called her up to hear about her work on the stand that Schuchard took.

EMILY DUFTON: So one of the things that they did was set up a community group of rules for their children. They were not allowed to access magazines like High Times. They couldn’t go see the Cheech and Chong movie. They had curfews and all of this other stuff. They weren’t allowed to access drugs or drug culture.

ED: Dufton says that, over the next few years, these parents helped organized groups in other towns and cities. By 1983, there were 4,000 of these groups. They networked, built national organizations, and they were all devoted to protecting the nation’s youth.

It became known as the Parent movement. And it didn’t take long for their message to catch on.

PUPPET VOICE: Now what are you going to say if someone asks you to try drugs?

CHILD SPEAKER: My mom and dad tell me not to. And I wouldn’t lie to them.

PUPPET VOICE: Sensational.

CHILD SPEAKERS (SINGING): So don’t use drugs. Don’t use drugs.

EMILY DUFTON: The biggest contribution to, really, America’s drug war that the Parent Movement was able to accomplish was that they transformed a conversation about marijuana, that used to be about an adults right to access a drug that was seen as benign and innocuous, into a conversation that was almost exclusively about children.

So this is the first time that you’d really seen a campaign against any drug that had children at the center of it.

PETER: In the ’80s, Nancy Reagan got behind the Parent Movement. At the same time, her “just say no” message was getting off the ground. The anti-drug message had gone mainstream.

EMILY DUFTON: What ends up happening is that a lot of corporations, like McDonald’s and Proctor Gamble and things like that, they jump onto the bandwagon as well and see this as a really great way to start marketing things, like McDonald’s Happy Meals or Proctor Gamble products, to families with small children.

So Procter Gamble actually would say, hey, we’d love to use this message and send out mailers to all the families in America and have kids sign “just say no” pledges. And by the way, you get all these coupons for Proctor Gamble products. And isn’t this a wonderful, mutually beneficial organization, here.

BRIAN: Kind of like pushers.

EMILY DUFTON: Yeah, exactly. They’re pushers but of Duncan Hines Cake Mix as opposed to marijuana.

ED: The Parent Movement had its day in the sun, but, by the ’90s, it was starting to die out. Marijuana use among young people had fallen off, either because of the movement’s success or maybe because of the availability harder drugs. It’s hard to know for sure. But Dufton says the story may not be quite over just yet.

EMILY DUFTON: We’re always sort of moving back and forth between prohibition and acceptance. And each cycle births the next. So we went from being really opposed to marijuana, being really against drugs in 1980s, and then, by the 1990s, by 1996, you had California’s approval of medical marijuana. Now we have 18 states and the District of Columbia who approved medical marijuana. And now, we actually see the resurgence of outright legalization.

Now will this birth a brand new cycle of prohibitions? Will a new anti-drug, grassroots movement arise? Maybe. So that’s why I’m kind of suggesting that the Parent Movement offers us an historical understanding of how we’ve reacted to legalized or decriminalized marijuana in the past and maybe how we might react again.

PETER: That was Emily Dufton. We’ll link to the story she wrote about the Parent Movement on our website, backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break but don’t go away. When we get back, the surprising origins of America’s first narcotics ban.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.