It’s been 44 years since Candace Lightner sparked a massive movement that changed America’s attitudes about drunk driving and raised the legal drinking age to 21. Curled up on a couch in her Northern Virginia home, she describes those victories as bittersweet.
“I wish I hadn’t started MADD,” she says, referencing Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (now Mothers Against Drunk Driving), the advocacy organization she launched in 1980 after her 13-year-old daughter Cari was struck and killed while walking to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, California. “I’m glad lives were saved, but frankly, I’d rather have my daughter back.”
Cari’s death wasn’t the first time Lightner’s life had been upended by an impaired driver. Years earlier, a crash caused by an intoxicated motorist had injured her mother and Cari’s twin sister, Serena. Soon after, Lightner’s son, Travis, who was four years old at the time, was run over in their cul-de-sac by a drug-impaired, unlicensed driver.
“She didn’t see Travis and ran over him completely. I helped lift the car off of him,” Lightner says. Travis suffered critical injuries and was in a coma for four days, but eventually recovered. He suffered permanent brain damage, “although you wouldn’t know it if you were to meet him today,” she says.
The crash that killed Cari was a breaking point for Lightner. What happened next is history. The petite, single mom of three took the country by storm, mobilizing a grassroots pressure campaign to enact drunk driving laws and lower the number of alcohol-related fatalities. She took her fight to schools and state legislatures, community centers and PTA meetings, and Capitol Hill.
Lightner was with her friend Leslie Hidley less than a week after Cari’s death when she conceived the idea for the nonprofit that would prompt her to leave a career in real estate and chart a new course. “She was enraged,” remembers Hidley, who lives in Ojai, California. “I thought, She is ideal for putting a stop to this. She gets things done.”
Soon, local MADD chapters were popping up in every state, formed mostly by mothers (and some fathers) of victims killed by drunk drivers. Widespread media attention followed, as did endorsements from celebrities such as Burt Reynolds and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Children of the ’80s still remember attending school assemblies featuring somber police officers, victims’ families and mangled cars as evidence of alcohol’s deadly effects.
“Almost single-handedly changing laws, changing minds, changing how we look at a car—she did that,” says Cindy Schreibman, a marketing professional in New York City who worked with Lightner on MADD branding in the nonprofit’s early days. “She did it out of love and she did it out of anger, but with all of that came global, sweeping mindset reform that has really saved more lives than we know. We all owe her a gigantic thank-you.”
In 1982, Lightner was appointed to President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Drunk Driving. America’s legal drinking age was subsequently raised to 21. MADD changed the second “D” in its acronym from Drivers to Driving—to condemn the act of drunk driving, not the person behind the wheel.
By 1985, the organization had more than 400 chapters and some 2 million members pushing for legislative changes at the state and federal level. Time Magazine lauded Lightner as a trailblazer in a feature called “Seven Who Succeeded.”
Looking back, Lightner has conflicted feelings about her “success.” In some ways, she regrets starting the organization that consumed so much of her time and energy. “It took me away from my surviving children,” she says plainly.
She parted ways with MADD in October of 1985, wrote a book about grief and focused on raising Serena and Travis. “I really started grieving for Cari after I left MADD,” she says. “With MADD, I dealt with the anger, but I didn’t deal with the pain.”
Five years later, her kids were grown and out of the house. She took a job with the American Beverage Institute, a trade group representing the restaurant industry on alcohol-related issues (a career move for which she was roundly criticized) and relocated from California to the D.C. area.
The job was short-lived, but her stay in the area wasn’t. “I moved to take that job, which didn’t last really long because I was so brutalized by the media,” she shares candidly. She eventually settled in Shirlington and took up other kinds of consulting work.
With the arrival of smartphones in the early aughts, concerns about road safety were back on her radar. In 2011, Lightner founded We Save Lives, a nonprofit that brings the dangers of “The Three D’s”—drunk, drugged and distracted driving—to the public forefront through legislative advocacy, media campaigns, consumer education and coalition building with more than 60 partner organizations.
Distracted driving is “a horrible problem and it’s socially acceptable,” says the activist, 78, who recently relocated to Alexandria and runs her latest operation from her home. (Travis lives close by in Arlington with his wife and three children.)
In 2022, more than 3,300 people died and some 290,000 were injured in vehicle crashes involving distracted drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. There’s more work to be done.
“Candace is someone who has the ability to get people to say, ‘Oh, I see why that’s important.’ She is a force to be reckoned with,” says Ed Wood, a resident of Tucson, Arizona, who met Lightner 13 years ago after his son was killed by a drug-impaired driver. He now serves as We Save Lives’ director of legislative affairs.
Pepper Edmiston, a longtime friend of Lightner’s living in Pacific Palisades, California, offers a similar assessment: “She’s brilliant and she’s extremely aggressive and bossy, and she always has a solution for everything, even if you didn’t ask her. She turned the world’s view of drunk drivers around. She’s a woman—in a man’s world. I admire her more than almost anyone I know.”
Though Lightner’s impact on our roads and highways is significant, some say her most enduring legacy is the playbook she created for grassroots organizing.
“What she was able to do created a path that was recognizable and repeatable for other issues and other important ideas,” says Lorne Adrain, a board member for We Save Lives. “The whole idea of social advocacy—she played a huge role in showing people how to do that.”
Out of her darkest moment, a devastated mom became a light for others.
Writer Dawn Klavon seeks out stories about extraordinary people—barrier-breakers, overcomers and game changers.