Lowe wanted a better life for her kids. She was not one of these carefree, stay-at-home Sandy Duncan-type moms. She was sensitive to her status in life. She had gone to Berkeley in the '50s, before the California’s flagship university became a countercultural mecca. Her classmates tended to be the most diligent students from California rather than the brainiest students from the nation as a whole. Graduates were more likely to raise a large family; Lowe and her husband had five children of their own. This period at Berkeley was more local than national, democratic than meritocratic, and socially conservative than socially liberal. She loved it. "The '50s were a great time to grow up. We had a great education," she enthused.

Lowe's later commitment to the anti-drug movement was unusually deep; among various accomplishments, she founded a political nonprofit that helped defeat California's pro-legalization initiative in 2010. But talk with anti-pot leaders and you find that many have a horror story about their children experimenting with marijuana. For them, pot is nothing less than a mortal threat to the success of their kids in schools and to a berth in the middle class. Marcie Beckett, an activist and a mother of two teenage boys in San Diego, described the problem this way: "I've seen grades plummet; I've seen kids not go to college, not hold a job."

In the late '70s and early '80s, middle-class moms' status anxieties about their kids' future in the meritocracy fueled a powerful social movement and campaign. First Lady Nancy Reagan became the public face of "Just Say No" after she made a trip to a New York ad agency in October 1983. She watched a demonstration of an anti-drug campaign from the Ad Council, the major charity of the advertising industry. Parents were told to "(g)et involved with drugs before your children do." And school children were told that drug use and academic success don't mix. As one print ad, with the title "School Daze," put it: "School is tough enough without having to try to learn through a mind softened by drugs. So get the education you deserve. And learn how to say no to drugs." According to The New York Times, Nancy Reagan approved: "Both of these themes are exactly right.”

Reagan is still alive at the ripe old age of 92. But her campaign against the Jeff Spicolis of the world is dead. And her “movement has evaporated,” as Ivy G. Cohen, the former president of the Just Say No Foundation, noted. Several large nonprofit groups—Families in Action and the foundation itself—either have been renamed or merged with other organizations. Other nonprofits, such as the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, disbanded.

Whatever you think of "Just Say No," its decline has warped the debate over the legalization of marijuana in this country. It has contributed to the fuzzy notion that generational replacement is and will be the driving force in American attitudes toward pot. "Millennials are at the forefront of the recent rise in public support for same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana," Pew Research concluded in a March report. Older Americans who oppose pot are dying off, the report added.