What’s interesting about this evolution—from wellness ads to mainstream, lifestyle-oriented ones—is that it’s happened before, and not just once. David Courtwright, a historian of drug use at the University of North Florida, notes that a similar progression took place with mass-produced beer and cigarettes, two other products that were stigmatized in their early years. In the late 19th century, technological advances made it easier to sell both goods to a wide market. Drinking and smoking picked up, and people panicked about the social problems that might ensue. Breweries tried to distance their product from hard liquor by marketing it as a safer, healthier, more acceptable alternative. Before Prohibition, one beer merchant in Detroit created an ad featuring a toddler in a high chair toting a mug of beer about the size of his head; a caption read, “The youngster, ruddy with good cheer. Serenely sips his Lager Beer.” Cigarette companies used similar tactics. A 1916 ad for Helmar Turkish cigarettes featured a doctor pointing a stern finger at the reader and declaring, “My best professional judgment prompts me to recommend them.”

Beer and cigarettes were also like pot in that what set one brand apart from another was, largely, branding. Once beer and cigarette companies had shed the negative associations with their products, they redoubled their efforts to get people to choose their brand over the others. They also worked increasingly hard—notoriously, in the case of cigarette companies—to broaden their audience, sometimes at the expense of the market for other pleasures. In the 1920s, Lucky Strike launched an ad campaign exhorting people to “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” One observer noted at the time, “The anti-sweet campaign looks like the first attempt to create consumers instead of merely tossing consumers from brand to brand.” When Prohibition ended, beer companies played it safe for a while, portraying idyllic domestic scenes—a wife serving a beer to her husband, a white-collar worker enjoying a cold one after a day at the office. But by the ’50s, beer had been so firmly established as acceptable—even all-American—that companies could turn to the project of attracting new drinkers, in new settings. To do so, it would help to make the case—often subtly—that everyone loved to drink, and that drinking was woven into the country’s social fabric. It’s not a coincidence that this is when the classic ads with couples at the beach and suburban lawn parties started to proliferate.

Supporters of recreational pot are attempting to put legalization measures on ballots in several states this fall, including California. People in other states are sure to follow. This raises the question of what pot marketing might look like in a world in which marijuana’s use has become even more normalized. On this point, the stories of the beer and cigarette industries could be especially instructive. As more people started consuming alcohol and tobacco in the mid-20th century—thanks in large part to all the aggressive marketing—public-health officials became much more invested in studying their potential health effects. Courtwright notes that this is when alcohol and tobacco marketing began to diverge. Alcohol was shown to cause health issues, but the fact that only some “problem drinkers” suffered serious damage helped the industry avoid blame and allowed beer companies to continue projecting their images of mainstream, middle-class fun. Cigarettes, of course, experienced a different fate, as it became clear that they were bad for pretty much everyone. When cigarette companies started associating their products with rebellion and individualism, they may have been responding to the public-health backlash—the message being, “We smoke because we don’t listen to the Man.” These ads were memorable, but not particularly effective: Smoking rates declined, and as the government tightened restrictions on tobacco advertising, they fell even further.