A few months ago, Twitter got a sustained chuckle out of the ill-advised — yet, somehow, also compulsively listenable — 1986 cassette McGruff’s Smart Kids Album. It’s a recording in which anti-drug spokesanimal McGruff the Crime Dog “sings” jazzy, synthy tunes about the dangers of alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants backed by a children’s chorus and some impressive studio musician chops.

McGruff and his musical explorations were but one of the many expressions in 1980s American media of a larger “just say no to drugs” public information campaign, one that enlisted everyone from sitcom stars to cartoon characters to First Ladies in an effort to wipe out the use of illegal drugs and alcohol in the young. The commonly accepted story — that the “just say no” slogan spontaneously originated with a visit First Lady Nancy Reagan made to a school shortly after her husband took office — is a bit disingenuous.

The Just Say No campaign was the culmination of many threads of postwar public opinion shaping that have their roots in both the American military-industrial complex and big business’s uses of mass psychology and media to enforce ideological conformity during the Cold War. Primary among these was, and still is, the Ad Council.