In 1981, Robert Anastas, a health educator and hockey coach in Wayland, Massachusetts, stood helplessly by as two of his students died of injuries sustained in two separate alcohol-related traffic crashes. Anastas decided to fight back and developed a fifteen-session high school course on driving while impaired. Rather than a curriculum focusing solely on the effects of alcohol while driving, he taught strategies for preventing driving after drinking, and he emphasized the legal consequences of getting caught. In this sense, the curriculum was a significant departure from traditional driver-education approaches.

Students who took Anastas's course reacted enthusiastically and formed an organization to reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths among their peers. They initially called the organization Students Against Driving Drunk (SADD) in order to focus attention on the act of drunk driving, not on the drivers themselves. An anecdote related by Peggy Mann...