Manufacturers used advertising in newspapers and magazines, and later on radio and television, to connect drinking with the good life. In a country that celebrated both drinking and driving, it has long been hard to convince people that it was unacceptable to do both.Īfter its brief flirtation with Prohibition in the 1920s, the United States readily welcomed back alcohol into its social fabric. More jarringly, from our modern vantage point, police and prosecutors characterized victims such as Lightner’s daughter Cary, who had been walking down the side of a highway when she was killed, as being “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Deaths caused by drunk drivers were “accidents.” For young men aged 21 to 44, who constituted the bulk of the offenders, drunk driving was almost a rite of passage. Even when drunk drivers caused serious injury or death, they often pleaded guilty to misdemeanors or traffic violations. It is no exaggeration to say that drunk driving was largely ignored in the United States until the late 1970s. But the persistence of drunk driving reveals how difficult it can be to restrict the actions of citizens who live in a country with a strong libertarian ethos. Nearly four decades later, most Americans are well aware of the anti-drunk driving agenda pioneered by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the organization that Lightner founded.
But in the early 1980s, a series of political and cultural factors coalesced to make drunk driving perhaps the foremost public health issue in the country. Recidivist drunk drivers had killed children-and adults-for decades in the United States, often receiving little more than a slap on the wrist. At a traffic safety conference in 1980, a Californian named Candy Lightner delivered her first public speech about a 13-year-old freckle-faced girl who had recently been killed by a drunk driver with several previous convictions.Īt the conclusion of her talk, she announced, “That girl was my daughter.”Īs Lightner later wrote, the press ran out of the auditorium to call their photographers.
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