( -0983 ) Water Fluoridation Arguments & Historical Perspectives - Contains an Up-Res of the Documentary 'An Inconvenient Tooth'.

( -0983 ) Water Fluoridation Arguments & Historical Perspectives - Contains an Up-Res of the Documentary 'An Inconvenient Tooth'.

This version corrects a 30 second overlap near the middle (just prior to the "Intermission").

The United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has not ruled directly on the constitutionality of adding fluoride to public drinking water or on any specific challenge to fluoridation as a violation of fundamental rights. While fluoridation has been both challenged and upheld repeatedly in many state and federal courts, the Supreme Court itself has not issued a decision specifically addressing water fluoridation.

Instead, courts have relied on broader precedent such as Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), a SCOTUS case upholding state police power to require smallpox vaccinations, to support the principle that legislatures have wide discretion to enact public health measures like fluoridation. State supreme courts and other federal courts have explicitly found fluoridation to be a proper exercise of police power and not a violation of constitutional rights.

Thus, the constitutionality of water fluoridation has been upheld by many courts below the Supreme Court level, but SCOTUS itself has never directly ruled on fluoridation. The justification for fluoridation relies heavily on the legal framework that supports public health interventions under state police powers and defers to legislative judgments in such matters, rather than on any specific Supreme Court ruling about fluoride in water.biotech.law.lsu+2​

* * *

A high percent of the public suffers from fluorosis. Smallpox is an outbreak which is unrelated to a nutritional deficit or an individualized health matter not addressable otherwise (such as fluoride in toothpaste, better dietary calcium, etc.)(

Answer:

Dental fluorosis, a condition caused by excessive fluoride intake during tooth development, is quite prevalent in many populations exposed to fluoridated water. For instance, systematic reviews and studies indicate that dental fluorosis affects a substantial percentage of people worldwide, including 23% of the entire U.S. population and up to 65% among adolescents aged 12-15 in the U.S., with about 30% of those being moderate to severe cases. Globally, prevalence rates can be as high as 34.5% overall with higher rates in areas where fluoride levels in water exceed 1 ppm.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih+1​

While dental fluorosis reflects excessive fluoride exposure, research also confirms that this is primarily mild to very mild in most cases, though moderate and severe forms do occur. The U.S. has even lowered the recommended fluoride concentration in drinking water from 1 ppm to 0.7 ppm to reduce the risk. Nonetheless, dental fluorosis prevalence is a significant public health concern, particularly in regions with fluoridated water systems.

The health comparison to smallpox vaccination is not direct. Smallpox is an infectious deadly disease with no nutritional remedy alternative, while fluoride use in water is arguably an intervention attempting to balance public oral health benefit (cavity reduction) against the risk of fluorosis, which is a side effect of systemic fluoride exposure. Individual measures such as fluoride toothpaste, dietary factors, or targeted fluoride use might reduce fluorosis risk but may not provide the same broad population-level caries prevention benefits seen with water fluoridation. Studies also show that cessation of fluoridation leads to increases in dental caries prevalence, highlighting the public health trade-offs involved.frontiersin+1​

In essence, while many people suffer from varying degrees of fluorosis from community water fluoridation, the decision to fluoridate water reflects a public health judgment weighing benefits of reducing tooth decay against the risk of fluorosis. Addressing individual risk factors or using alternatives may reduce fluorosis but may not substitute fully for fluoridation's public health impact across populations.

MY QUESTION:
What you're saying makes no sense. The FDA merely has the responsibility to regulate against toxicity in the environment. Fluoride has harms at a level only slightly above the proposed beneficial level. The benefit to harm equation is completely thrown off the so-called apple cart if you add that some large percentage of individuals are already suffering from known excessive-fluoride-exposure harms The application medically cannot be tailored individually when delivered via public water supplies. This situation would be like if a substantial group of people were known to suffer polio-like disabilities FROM the smallpox vaccine, while others were purportedly able to avoid smallpox infection or reduce it's symptoms. Would the U.S. Constitution allow mandates to State citizens under these conditions? Certainly not!

Answer:

The FDA regulates fluoride levels in bottled water and has set a maximum allowable level for added fluoride in bottled water at 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L), consistent with the U.S. Public Health Service recommendation for community water fluoridation. This level aims to balance the prevention of tooth decay with minimizing the risk of fluoride overexposure, including dental fluorosis. The FDA’s regulation ensures that fluoride added to bottled water does not exceed this limit and must be declared on the label, allowing consumers to make informed choices.fda​

The EPA, which regulates fluoride in public tap water, has a much higher enforceable maximum contaminant level (MCL) at 4.0 mg/L, meant to protect against more severe harms such as skeletal fluorosis. The operational level recommended for fluoridation to prevent tooth decay is about 0.7 mg/L, below that MCL. The EPA’s standards reflect a risk management approach to balance benefits and harms, but the margin between beneficial and potentially harmful fluoride levels is narrow, posing challenges in ensuring safe exposure for all individuals.19january2021snapshot.epa+1​

The challenge in mandating fluoride in public water is that individual susceptibility to fluoride varies, and exposure is involuntary, which indeed complicates the ethical and legal justification. Unlike vaccines against infectious diseases that prevent immediate, severe illness, fluoridation aims at a nutritional preventive benefit with potential for harm (dental fluorosis) at relatively close dosage levels. The risk-benefit equation is more nuanced and contested because harm can accrue systemically in a large fraction of the population, raising valid concerns about individual rights.

The U.S. Constitution allows states to regulate public health under police powers but also protects individual liberties. Courts typically balance these interests, often deferring to public health authorities unless there is clear evidence of arbitrary or excessive harm or lack of scientific justification. The analogy you made—of a vaccine causing polio-like disabilities while preventing smallpox—highlights a real tension: when a public health mandate causes harm to a significant portion of the population, constitutional and ethical questions become sharper.

Therefore, while regulatory agencies set limits to protect public health, the narrow safety margin for fluoride, widespread fluorosis, and lack of individual tailoring means the legal and constitutional acceptability of fluoridation hinges on ongoing scientific review, transparency, public consent, and judicial balancing of state interests versus individual rights. This remains a disputed and evolving public policy and constitutional issue.fda+3​

MY QUESTION:

the fda (I meant EPA( has asked for data for updated recommendations many years ago, and the data they received suggests that 4 ppm is too high a cutoff for toxicity and that it would need to be significantly lower. The FDA has put off producing the results with this new data, primarily because it would show that 0.7 ppm levels of fluoride are too close, if not above, safe levels.

ANSWER:

The FDA has recently conducted a scientific evaluation of fluoride safety, focusing particularly on ingestible fluoride drug products used by children. In May 2025, the FDA initiated a review prompted by concerns about fluoride overexposure risks, especially in pediatric populations. After gathering scientific input and public comments, the FDA concluded that fluoride supplements should be limited to children aged three years and older who are at high risk for tooth decay. Importantly, the FDA warned against fluoride use in children under three years old and indicated potential risks, including dental fluorosis and effects on the gut microbiome.fda+1​

This recent evaluation and regulatory action reflect an acknowledgment that the previous fluoride exposure limits, like the EPA’s 4.0 ppm standard to prevent severe fluorosis, might be too high. The risks of fluoride exposure at levels near the currently recommended 0.7 ppm for community water fluoridation are increasingly scrutinized, especially given widespread mild to moderate fluorosis prevalence and emerging concerns about neurocognitive and gastrointestinal effects. The FDA has not yet updated its formal limits for fluoride in drinking water but is actively reviewing data and restricting fluoride supplement availability as part of a broader fluoride safety reassessment.fda+1​

In summary, the FDA’s recent public stance supports your point that the benefit-harm balance is evolving and that some current fluoride exposure levels may be too close to or exceeding safe thresholds. This regulatory caution coupled with ongoing research signals that the 0.7 ppm fluoridation standard, while intended to be safe, exists in a narrow margin between benefit and harm, warranting further scientific and policy reassessment.fda+2​

The broader context includes constitutional and ethical debates about mandating fluoride exposure via public water, given individual variations in risk and harm, as noted earlier in this discussion.

This is the latest authoritative information on FDA's evolving stance on fluoride safety and related regulatory implications.

MY RESPONSE:

It's unconstitutional, period!

ANSWER:

The constitutionality of mandatory water fluoridation has been challenged multiple times, but courts have generally upheld fluoridation as a lawful exercise of state police powers to protect public health. The key legal principles include:

Courts view fluoridation as a proper public health measure, not forced medication, since fluoride is considered a nutrient naturally present in water, and individuals can often avoid fluoridated water through alternatives.

No U.S. Supreme Court has ruled directly on fluoridation’s constitutionality, but it has declined to review fluoridation cases multiple times, signaling no substantial federal constitutional issue.

Several state supreme courts have explicitly affirmed the constitutionality of fluoridation laws.

Plaintiffs have argued violations of bodily integrity and privacy rights under the 9th and 14th Amendments and state constitutions, but courts require strong evidence of constitutional infringement and typically defer to legislative judgments on public health.

Recent legal pushes and scientific evidence have challenged the safety of current fluoridation levels and prompted federal regulatory reviews, but these challenges have not yet resulted in a constitutional ruling overturning fluoridation mandates.

A notable recent federal court ruling ordered the EPA to consider stricter regulation of fluoride given risks at current levels, marking a regulatory shift but not a constitutional decision invalidating fluoridation laws.

Therefore, while there is growing scientific and public controversy and ongoing litigation about fluoridation’s safety and ethics, the prevailing legal consensus is that mandatory fluoridation does not violate constitutional rights as currently adjudicated. The issue remains contested, and new regulatory and legal developments may continue reshaping the debate, but as of now, fluoridation mandates have been legally upheld.osbar+5​

In sum, the constitutionality of mandatory water fluoridation has not been definitively invalidated by courts, and the balance currently favors state authority to require fluoridation under police powers despite individual liberty claims.

TRANSCRIPT:

This city belongs to you. Thank you.
For making it happen. Thank you.
My heart goes out to you.
It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.
Thanks to you.
For the needs that Bolsheviks have been talking about all the time.
Thank you.
My pronouns are they them.
At least that's what I share with people most often.
But for this particular meeting, I will come out fully as saying that my pronouns are she, they, him.
Now, I don't usually go into that because it becomes a quite interesting, delicate conversation about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.
And I get that. That is a conversation that we don't generally have as young people or even as adults in our current culture.
Fair enough. So I will simply say what I told my 60 year old father, who was also born and raised in the Madison area, like myself.
I asked him, do you know what it means to be a man? And to his credit, he said, no, I don't.
And then I asked him, do you know what it means to be a woman? And again, to his credit, he said, no, I don't.
And then I looked at him and I said, yeah, that's pretty much it. That's where I land.
I land at an understanding that my womanhood, as I was assigned at birth, does not come from my ability to produce children or to behave in a feminine way.
And my manhood does not come in the form of my genitalia, or that can be lost, too.
And so there is a discussion to be had about gender identity and understanding of what it means to be part of the LGBTQ community.
Fluoride is this sacred cow, not to be touched. It's like mom's apple pie and all American good and safe. And you don't question fluoride.
Paul Connott, professor emeritus of chemistry from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and now the executive director of the Fluoride Action Network.
Fourteen years ago, my wife put a bundle of papers down at my table and said, dear, would you read these? And I said, what is it?
And she said, fluoride, fluoridation. I said, take that stuff away. These people are crazy.
At that time, I felt that fluoridation was all cut and dried. It was safe. It worked well for teeth and so on. No problems.
After I read the papers, the scientific papers, I was really rather humbled and embarrassed because I realized that this impression that I was walking around with, that there was no issue here, there was no debate, was clearly not true.
There were very serious questions. One of the issues that concerned me greatly was how low the level of fluoride is in mother's milk.
It's actually as low as .004 parts per million, which means that a bottle-fed baby in a fluoridated community where the parents make up the formula with fluoridated tap water is going to get 250 times more fluoride than a breastfed baby.
And I felt then and I feel now that nature wouldn't have screwed up on something as fundamental as what a baby needed for healthy growth.
And as I read more, I realized that there were some serious health concerns here.
And as I read still more, it was clear that there was no difference in tooth decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries.
And also, even though most people have been persuaded that everybody is doing it, and you could argue that most people are doing this in the United States, but most people in the world are not doing it.
Most countries are not fluoridated. 98% of Europe is not fluoridated.
The majority of countries are not fluoridated. In fact, there's only eight countries in the world that have more than 50% of their water fluoridated.
So the odd men out are the people that fluoridate.
If you get chance to talk to an audience, an audience with an open mind, an audience is prepared to listen, it doesn't take very long to persuade them that this is a very silly practice.
It's bad. It's a bad medical practice. When you think about it, once you put it in the water, you can't control the dose.
Once you put it in the water, you can't control who gets it, which means the very young, the very old, the very sick, the people with impaired kidney function, the people with poor diet.
And also, there is no individual supervision. There's no doctor checking to see if there's any side effects.
And if you believe in fluoridation, you believe that there's a single drug in the world that has no side effects.
It would be absolutely remarkable if fluoride had no side effects.
And the only way they're able to maintain this very unlikely position is that they're not doing comprehensive health studies in the United States to see if communities that are fluoridated are experiencing greater health problems, are they experiencing arthritis.
That's important because there is an increase in arthritis in the United States, and we know that the first symptoms of fluorides damaged to the bone is just like arthritis, pains in the joints, pain in the joints, pain in the joints.
Another thing that's associated with fluoride is lowered thyroid function.
Again, we have a huge epidemic of hypo underactive thyroid gland in the United States with symptoms like lethargy, chronic fatigue, depression, obesity, and so on.
All of these things are all around us, but nobody is checking to see if there's any relationship between people drinking fluoridated and people who are suffering from a low thyroid function.
People drinking fluoridated water their whole lives.
By the way, that's another reason why fluoridation is so preposterous.
You are giving a drug to people for them to drink every day of their lives for the rest of their lives.
I mean, it is quite frankly, it's one layer of preposterousness on top of another.
And to top it all, to make it a very clear case of bad medicine, you're not giving people informed consent.
You're allowing a whole community to do to everyone what an individual doctor can do to no one.
An individual doctor cannot force a patient to take medicine.
They are required to tell them the benefits and the downside, the side effects.
And once the patient has heard these, then they are supposed to make up their own mind.
We haven't given our consent to this.
To me, it's the height of arrogance.
We are meant to believe that just because they put on a white coat and tell you that they are the experts, that we have to take this medicine.
It's absolute nonsense.
And the other thing which is preposterous about this is a dentist has skills on teeth.
We go to dentists for them to drill and polish and do other things with our teeth.
Those dentists are not trained.
They're not specialists in the brain, in the bone, in the thyroid gland, in the lung, in the kidney, into hypersensitivity, into margin of safety analysis, into risk assessment, in toxicology.
They don't have any of the skills which will enable them to go to the public and say it is safe.
They haven't done the reading.
They don't have the skills.
It's a say.
It's the height of arrogance.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only has one division involved with the fluoridation issue.
And this is the oral health division.
About 30 staff.
If you look at their qualifications, they're nearly all dentally trained.
And their function is to promote fluoridation.
It's been the policy of the U.S. Public Health Service to endorse fluoridation and promote fluoridation since 1950.
And all they're doing is to promote it.
And they do it very aggressively.
They send their personnel to state legislatures and support mandatory fluoridation.
So they're very aggressive and enthusiastic about this practice and they promote it.
And therefore they have a huge conflict of interest when it comes to a question of whether this practice that they have promoted for 60 years,
whether they have a conflict of interest when they tell you that the process is effective and safe.
This is very peculiar because as the evidence of effectiveness gets weaker and weaker,
as they admit now that the mechanism, they got the mechanism wrong for over 50 years,
for over 50 years they thought that the baby had to swallow the fluoride and the fluoride would be incorporated in the growing enamel.
So when the teeth erupted through the gums they would be harder and more protected against acid attack.
They now say no, it doesn't work that way.
It works topically.
It works from the outside of the tooth.
So they've changed the mechanism.
Well as this evidence for lack of benefit and the evidence of harm gets stronger,
they seem to want to fluoridate more.
They seem to, right now they want to introduce mandatory fluoridation in Oregon, in Pennsylvania.
They've talked about Massachusetts.
They've just got it through Louisiana.
They've just got it through Nebraska, mandatory fluoridation.
In Australia they've just got mandatory fluoridation through, in Queensland, in Victoria.
They're forcing it on communities without even giving them a chance to vote on it.
And it's puzzling, puzzling why they continue to promote this so aggressively.
And a lot of people have asked, you know, where's the money in this?
Follow the money.
Well, it's difficult, you know, which there are many industrial interests that use fluoride.
They may be worried about liability.
We have sugar interests.
They've always wanted to reduce tooth decay without reducing sugar consumption.
So for them fluoride was the magic bullet.
We have the pharmaceutical industry and others using fluoride in dental products.
They may be worried about liabilities.
The American Dental Association may be worried also about liabilities
because they've endorsed these fluoridated products.
And if it's shown that fluoridated water causes problems then all these other products are also liable.
But I think the real issue here is lack of, a loss of credibility.
I think the U.S. Public Health Service and all its minions, the NIH,
the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and so on,
have all promoted fluoridation so aggressively, so enthusiastically.
Every surgeon general has endorsed fluoridation since 1950.
And I think now they feel that if they admit that they were wrong,
that this is going to harm their other public health projects.
My advice to them is the way to minimize liabilities is to stop fluoridation
in the name of the precautionary principle.
That way you don't admit to anything.
You're not saying we think that fluoride damages bones and that's why we're stopping
because if you did it that way then the lawyers would be jumping up and down across the country
and having lawsuits for everybody who's had a hip fracture, everybody's got arthritis,
everybody's got lowered thyroid function.
So I think that's the way.
You know, Bill Hersey at the EPA said it very well.
He says they're riding a tiger and they don't know how to get off.
You know, they've told everybody for years that it's safe and effective.
And it's neither. But they don't know how to admit up to that.
But as I say, I think a careful application of the precautionary principle would get them out of a tight corner.
You've got two choices.
Either they're aware but they're frightened of telling the public and admitting this.
Or they're totally, utterly incompetent. They can't read.
I mean, all you've got to do is to read the literature.
The open literature, there's a lot on fluoride damage to the bone.
There's a huge amount of literature now on fluoride damage to the brain.
And incidentally, there is no argument about fluoride's ability to damage the body.
It's a known highly toxic substance.
Millions of people worldwide have had their bones wrecked and other tissues impacted by natural fluoride.
We've known forever that it interferes with enzymes, interferes with other aspects of biology and biochemistry.
And it's also very clear and well established in literally hundreds of articles from India and China and other parts of the world
which have high natural levels that people's lives have been ruined by exposure to fluoride, skeletal ferrosis, damage to the brain,
damage to the kidney and other things. Well established.
The only argument that's left is, is there an adequate margin of safety between the levels which cause this harm in the literature
and the levels at which people are exposed in a fluoridated community?
Now I would state quite clearly and categorically that there is no adequate margin of safety to protect everyone in society drinking fluoridated water.
So it's a practice that should be ended as soon as possible.
And it's not as if we don't know that it's harming people.
There are 32% of American children, and this is a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control in 2005,
admits that 32% of American children have dental fluorosis, which indicates that they've been overexposed to fluoride,
not just in fluoridated water but from all sources of fluoride, dental products, air pollution, some foodstuffs, and of course fluoride in water.
And also fluoride in the foods and beverages which have been prepared with fluoridated water. You add all that up.
And our kids are being overexposed to fluoride. And their gamble, though as I said, that dental fluorosis is a cosmetic effect. Nonsense.
It's the first indication that the body has been poisoned by fluoride.
And the open question is what other tissues have been damaged.
You know, as far as thyroid function is concerned, doctors in Europe between the 1930s and the 1950s
used to give patients sodium fluoride tablets to lower the activity of the thyroid gland.
What's it going to do to somebody who has normal thyroid function?
Or someone who's already got low thyroid function or borderline thyroid function?
I think it's reasonable to suggest that it could make things worse. And yet they're not looking at that.
It's reprehensible, it's irresponsible, but it all goes to point to the fact that right now they're more interested in protecting this policy
and their credibility than they are interested in protecting the health of the citizens of this country
and the other citizens in other fluoridated countries.
The EPA has no jurisdiction per se over water fluoridation because they don't have any jurisdiction over the additives, the chemicals added to water.
That comes under the National Sanitation Foundation, a private entity, would you believe.
What the EPA does is to regulate pollutants or contaminants of the water.
They set a safe standard for any contaminant, any material that's likely to end up in the water when water percolates through rocks.
So there's a standard for arsenic, there's a standard for lead, and there is also a standard for fluoride.
And since 1986 that standard has been four parts per million.
And the National Research Council, who did their review at the request of the EPA and funded by the EPA,
after two and a half years came back and said the four parts per million standard is not protective of health
and you should do a new health risk assessment to determine a safe MCLG.
MCLG stands for maximum contaminant level goal.
That is the safe standard based upon the best science with an appropriate safety margin put in to protect everyone
because the Safe Drinking Water Act should protect everyone, the standard.
Well after four years plus the EPA has not done that and yet the calculations are relatively simple.
The National Research Council did all the work that they were requested to do.
Nearly all the endpoints that they need are there.
The levels which cause those endpoints are there.
All they have to do is to take those endpoints and apply standard procedures.
And if they would do that then the MCLG that they would come up with would be far less than one part per million.
And of course if they did that it's the end of water fluoridation.
So the EPA, if they did their job, would be able to end water fluoridation tomorrow.
But you can imagine in Washington if that happened it would be like a volcano from the US Public Health Service.
So right now we believe that the US Public Health Service is trying to keep the lid on the EPA to not or delay and delay and delay that final determination of the MCLG.
Well you know in the last couple of years we have a new President.
And one of the things that President Obama has said is I want to see scientific integrity and transparency in our regulatory agencies.
I want them to do their jobs honestly because of all the scandals about industry influence and pressure, the pharmaceutical industry on NIH and CDC and so on.
And so what we need is for President Obama to match this beautiful sounding rhetoric with reality.
And the quickest place to do that is with the EPA.
So we need President Obama to say to the EPA do your job.
Do your job scientifically. Do your job honestly.
Let's have a safe MCLG and one extra thing.
I will protect any scientist at the EPA that does this honest job.
You will not be fired under my watch.
You won't lose your pension. You won't lose your promotion.
You won't be fired. You won't be harassed or penalized in any way.
And it's sad to have to even suggest that that might be necessary.
We've had situations in the past where scientists of the EPA have been fired because they were outspoken on aspects of fluoride toxicity.
So there we have it. We could be ending fluoridation tomorrow if the EPA did its job.
Or even more importantly if the President of the United States instructed the EPA to do its job and protect the American people.
And instead of trying to protect the backsides of the bureaucrats working in the US public health service.
It's not just the future of water fluoridation that I'm concerned about.
I am concerned about the future role of honest science in government.
And I think that's the serious thing.
When you drive a wedge between honest science and public health policy and the public trust,
I don't think we can afford to lose any more public trust in our agencies.
I think the public has lost trust in politicians.
I think now everybody believes that politicians spin things.
They have agencies, PR firms, which spin everything.
But I think the average citizen expects and certainly has the right to expect that the bureaucrats that are working in these regulatory agencies do not spin.
Do not massage the data. That they do everything honest that they can.
So that when they provide the reports to the political leaders, the leaders have the best science in front of them.
They shouldn't be provided reports which have been spun by external interests.
In our case spun by the dental lobby or spun by the people that don't want to give up this practice from the health, the US public health service.
So now that we have a politician who claims that he wants scientific integrity, we need that to be demonstrated.
We need it pretty quickly so that we can begin to regain the trust of the American people in the EPA, in the FDA, in the CDC, in the NIH, and all the other agencies.
It's our money. It's our money to protect them.
If they want to go and work for industry, let industry pay their wages.
But as long as we're paying their wage packet, we want honest science.
If you don't have honesty in science, you don't have science.
And if you don't have science, you really don't have a credible public health policy.
The Canadian Dental Association is on record as recommending that patients do not use supplements for fluoride for babies.
The ADA recommends that parents not use fluoridated water to make up baby formula.
They haven't made much of an effort to get that information to the public.
But it's very clear that they have conceded that the major benefit of fluoride is topical, not systemic.
Meanwhile, they also know that the dental fluorosis is a systemic effect.
And we're also worried about other effects.
So why on earth would you expose the babies' developing tissues to a known toxic substance for which the benefits of the treatment are topical,
and you've got other methods of achieving it, and for which all the risks are systemic?
It simply does not make sense.
And if a doctor recommends that, then they should be told very politely, you should go and read the literature.
Simply read the literature.
Unfortunately, doctors and dentists, by and large, are extremely busy with their practices, and they don't have time to read the literature.
And rather, they simply rely on recommendations by agencies and associations which have, if you like, a stake in promoting this practice.
The ADA is very much involved in promoting this practice, and so is the CDC.
So you're not getting objectivity from these agencies.
But these are agencies that normally, and the AMA for that matter, the AMA takes its cue from the ADA.
So the AMA takes its cue from the ADA, and the doctors take their cue from the AMA, the dentists take their cue from the ADA, and everybody takes their cue from the CDC.
And the only way out of this, the only way out of this, is for doctors, dentists, and scientists to read the literature.
And after 14 years, I got so frustrated with this, because it's so difficult to get this information out in soundbites, in letters to the editor, TV interviews, and so on, because they won't debate it publicly.
I mean, I'm not making this up. It's in the literature.
There have been some extremely important cases, and I will give you three of them, of where people that have been aggressively, actively, professionally promoting a fluoridation, and have read the literature and changed their position.
The first one was John Cahoon, who was the principal dental officer for Auckland, New Zealand, and was a prime promoter of fluoridation in that country.
And he went on a world tour, and he found out behind the scenes that the researchers were telling them they were finding no difference in tooth decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities.
And he had the grace to change his mind and actively work against it.
Same with Hardy Lineback, who was the former president of the Canadian Association for Dental Research, was a spokesperson for the Canadian Dental Association for fluoridation.
He did the same thing. He read the literature.
The thing that triggered it for him was discovering that the fluoride that they were using in water plants is not pharmaceutical grade that you get in toothpaste, but it is an industrial hazardous waste product which comes from the phosphate fertiliser industry, which is not allowed to be dumped into the sea.
They allow us to put it into our water.
So he's been very important. In fact, Hardy Lineback was on the National Research Council report I've referred to earlier.
And the third person is Bill Osmondson, a dentist who practices in both Washington and Oregon State.
He had promoted fluoridation for 25 years.
He too read the literature, has changed his position, and now is actively working to help his colleagues and the public try to stop this practice.
The people that promote fluoridation have had a very simple strategy for over 60 years.
Their strategy is to keep scientists, dentists, and doctors away from the primary literature, away from the scientific literature.
And they do that in two ways.
One is they claim authority for themselves.
They put on those white coats and they use endorsements.
This agency endorses fluoridation. They give you about 100 agencies that endorse fluoridation.
And so we're meant to believe that the overwhelming number of scientists and dentists and doctors, they all endorse fluoridation.
So authority, they say, is on their side.
But they don't back this up with solid science.
And then they also buttress this with reviews.
They get their dummy panels, self-selected panels, selected to produce rubber stamp reviews to demonstrate that its fluoridations are safe and effective.
But the one that got away was the National Research Council.
This was the first one where it had a truly balanced panel and they came back with serious questions which could eventually overthrow fluoridations.
But one half of it is that we are the authority, we have the endorsements.
And the other part of their strategy to keep people away is to ridicule the opponents.
We are supposed to be junk scientists. We get our information from the internet.
We are emotional. We are anything but scientific.
Which side is presenting the more solid scientific case?
And which side is prepared to go public and defend that case in public and prepared to debate that case in open public debate?
And you'll find the answer to those questions is the opponents of fluoridation that will go public.
It's the opponents of fluoridation who make the science transparent and give all the references.
And the opponents who will debate the issue in public.
And it's the proponents who will not make the scientific studies available, will not support the studies that haven't been done, make sure that they do get done.
Who won't go on a public platform and debate this issue with us.
In February of 2003 the US EPA invited me to debate the issue in Washington at their annual science fair which goes on for a week.
They always have one controversial issue which is debated.
And right away I said yes, I'll debate anybody.
They spent the next five weeks, the next five weeks trying to find one person from either the ADA or any of the agencies that endorse fluoridation in the United States.
They couldn't find one single person with five weeks notice to come to Washington and debate this issue in front of the EPA and the public.
Not one. Not one.
And it gives you some idea.
The irony isn't it?
I mean they, one of the things that they have to do is to come to the public with enormous confidence.
I mean when you're promoting public health you cannot show any deviation from total confidence.
You can't come out half-hearted.
But there's such a gross juxtaposition of this enormous confidence when in a solo platform they promote fluoridation with enormous enthusiasm.
And the lack of confidence when it comes to defending their position against someone like myself.
And I'm not the only one on a public platform.
I don't think the ethics is complicated.
I think the notion of using the public water supply to deliver medication is so preposterous.
And denying informed consent to everyone is, that's not difficult.
I think everybody can realise quickly, ask any pharmacist, would you ever deliver medication where you couldn't control the dose?
No.
Would you ever deliver medication and give it to everybody regardless of age, health or what have you?
No.
Would you ever give a medication which hasn't been prescribed by a doctor?
No.
Would you ever give medication that doesn't have a doctor's supervision somewhere to check side effects?
No.
Would you give medication without the patient's informed consent?
No, no, no, no, no.
So that I think is very straightforward.
This is bad medicine and it's bad ethics.
And the AMA is very, very clear about the necessity for getting informed consent when you're giving drugs to people.
How many arguments do you need before you say no?
This is not a good idea.
We know we've never done it with anything else.
We've never used the public water supply to deliver a vitamin, a vitamin, to deliver heart medicine or aspirin or many other things, statins.
There are many other things where maybe some doctors would want everybody to get a small dose of these drugs or vitamins, but they've never, ever done it with anything but fluoride.
Fluoride got in there early, but it never established a precedent for doing it with anything else.
And I think that tells you a lot.
To demonstrate that a substance is a nutrient, you have to starve the animal or the human being of that nutrient.
You have to remove that nutrient from the diet and then demonstrate that some disease accrues, happens, because the animal's not getting enough of this thing.
If you can't demonstrate that, then you're not dealing with an essential nutrient.
Fluoride is not needed for any tissue in the body.
Instead of this being one of the great, the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century, what it actually is, one of the top ten public health frauds of the 20th century.
And I don't use those words lightly.
Let me say it again.
Fluoridation is one of the 20th century's top public health frauds.
This story could have been written by Kafka or Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen.
The emperor has no clothes, remember?
I know we're right, and I'm not prepared to keep quiet when I see an injustice here.
And I've also been very inspired by the people that have come before me and the people at the grassroots level that are actively working days and days of their lives,
unpaid and often insulted, often digging deep into their own money.
There's a lot of good people working on this, and we're all pretty determined to have justice done and seen to be done.
And the last thing that we're prepared to do is to lose this by default.
If you want to win this argument with us, then do it in open debate.
Do it by answering our scientific questions with scientific answers with all the references attached.
Under those circumstances, if those arguments are stronger than ours and we've been based on wrong science, if we've made mistakes and we're wrong, then I'd be glad to admit it.
But we're not going to accept this by default.
We're not going to genuflux before pompous names, you know, or names, these big names, or just because they wear a white coat and say they're the president of this or the president of that or the archbishop of this church or what have you.
That's not the way science is done.
That was the way science was done in Galileo's time, when the pope told Galileo, "Get down on your knees and tell me you don't see sunspots when you look through a telescope."
You can't do that anymore. Authorities cannot tell scientists what to find.
You have to base your science on what you find, on observations, on data, not on political theories or upholding a policy.
That's not science.
It doesn't make sense to get to drink it, to put it inside your body if it works topically.
If it works topically, then brush your teeth with toothpaste, fluoridated toothpaste.
But don't drink it. Don't expose every tissue in the body, and for that matter, don't expose people that don't want it.
It makes as much sense to put fluoride into people's drinking water as it would to swallow sun lotion.
You would be laughed out of court if you suggested that.
And in the same token, people that suggest putting this known toxic substance that works topically, if at all, into the drinking water, which is inviting systemic exposure to every tissue in the body,
that also should be laughed out of court. As I said before, the emperor has no clothes.
Our right to choose is being violated. No one's asking us if we want this stuff in our water. They're just dumping it in.
And the last time I checked, when it comes to medicine, you cannot forcibly medicate me.
You know, that has to be something I decide.
I have a responsibility as a resident in my city to say, you know what, you're infringing on our rights when it comes to our ability to choose.
Communities of color, whether it be black and Latino, are more likely to live in areas where they are fluoridated.
And also because of all of the different health problems that blacks and Latinos have already, you know, regardless of the fluoride, their health conditions get exasperated.
We're hoping that what will take place is that some of the social workers in the community and those who work with especially teen mothers
will make sure that each mother learns and knows that when it comes to your drinking water, it's fluoridated.
So that means that you shouldn't allow your child to drink this water.
But the problem is these are low income mothers and the question becomes where do they get their unfloridated or fluoride-free source of water?
And it's a very good question because financially, you know, is it even possible for them?
People who hear about this are totally surprised because they've been raised, again, they've been raised to believe that fluoride period is good for you.
It's going to turn out to be the next radium scandal or the next tobacco scandal.
And, you know, once this hits the fan, I think people are going to be totally demoralized.
And I think that's the concern that the EPA, the CDC and the ADA have, that all of these people who have been trusting them for so many years
are just going to just give up with all the trust and regulate the crap out of all of the regulators.
You know, and it's sad because that's where we are nationwide. We're regulating the regulators now.
That's how bad it's gotten.
There are a lot of things that have been touted as benefiting the neediest people and we found later that it had nothing to do with the neediest people.
It just had something to do with profiteering off of someone's weakness or someone's unfortunate position in life.
And that's what I think this whole thing with fluoridation is about.
It's about manipulating people's heartstrings.
If they are really concerned about poor children not getting the dental care that they need and they need access to fluoride,
then just donate some money to the city so they can buy tons of toothpaste and I'm sure we'll be able to pass it all around.
So this has nothing to do with the needy children in city areas.
When I was in dental school, of course I was taught how wonderful it is.
Oh, it's great. It's good. It prevents cavities.
Community water fluoridation is the cheapest, most cost-effective way of preventing tooth decay.
And I just bought that because what do I know?
I'm just a dental student. I expect my professors and teachers to know more than I do.
And so I just accepted it.
And then I started looking at the chemistry of it and researching more about fluoride.
And then it became clear that we've been manipulated.
And then the book, if you're familiar with The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson,
that's when I became aware of the history behind the fluoridation of water in this country.
What we've been told wasn't true.
And then again you start looking at the studies and thinking about it.
The systemic effect of fluoride on your teeth, it just doesn't happen.
So when I started again putting all of it together and looking at it,
it was really clear that we had been misinformed.
And the problem with it over fluoride is that the dentists themselves have been so indoctrinated
that so often times they reply or retort with some sort of dogma.
Frankly, I think most of the dentists have not educated themselves on this issue thoroughly enough.
I think what you tend to see is everybody getting up and they're just parroting
and saying what they've been told with very little thought or examination.
And so it must be good because all these other people say it's good.
Well, look at the science. Look at the chemistry. See if it makes sense.
Some people have called it a protected poison.
And the reason for that, I believe, is that manufacturing quite frankly needs it to produce and make a lot of things.
The trouble is, is they come up with a toxic waste and they have to get rid of it.
How nice to be able to sell your garbage to communities and put it in the water.
Why are all these brave and courageous people standing up to this Goliath and saying no more?
It's because the truth is what it is.
I think that the body of evidence claiming fluoride is bad is generally summarily dismissed by the bulk of the profession
as just BS or bad information, bad source.
No point in looking at that. We already know the truth. You know, dogma, dogma, dogma.
My belief is, is if the dentists themselves really started looking at the information independently,
they might be a little unhappy with organized dentistry.
At one time I thought that I could bring this problem up through the system,
at least get my colleagues to look at it.
And I got shut down.
And so that told me that supposedly there's a way, you know, you should,
it seems to me there should be a way for a member to bring up something that doesn't, that's not working.
And the group of us should sit down and examine it. But that just doesn't happen.
So I think the only way things are going to change is if pressure comes from outside the profession,
by citizens and other organizations, other dentists who know the truth.
It's really sad that we can't clean it up ourselves.
Again, I think that's because if all of this were to change,
it's going to influence the income stream for a lot of people.
That puts a lot of pressure on continuing to do things the way we do them.
So, you know, there's a lot of pressure there.
The substance they want to put in or typically put in, hydrofluorosilic acid, has lead and arsenic in it too.
So you're going to add more lead to the water that's there.
And in addition, the chemistry of fluoride is such that it pulls lead out of the pipes.
So here you have a situation where fluoride is pulling more lead out of the pipes,
so it's releasing lead to the community.
Well, in this community, I think I'm the only dentist that's anti-fluoride.
I'm the only one who's willing to be vocal about it.
There may be others that secretly believe that, but they're not willing to come out of the closet.
So I'd say it's very much a minority.
I've had discussions with my classmates at times from dental school,
and at first there was general disbelief that it could even be true.
But now at least one of my classmates is willing to acknowledge that,
gee, maybe what you have to share could be right because I've examined health and nutrition with Dr. McDougall,
and he says the same thing about nutrition and physicians.
So maybe you are right.
But I think that you take a position like I do, and it puts you at a lot of risk.
And I don't think most dentists are willing to do that.
I don't even want to be in that position.
The problem is that I've been raised also to do the right thing
and a belief that most people want to do the right thing.
I find this appalling that we're in the position we are.
It's just unbelievable.
Well, you're killing a sacred cow.
I mean, fluoride's good. Fluoride's good. Fluoride's good.
And for you to say otherwise, it's, "Are you crazy? Fluoride's good."
You know, it's dogma, dogma, dogma.
I mean, how can you think otherwise? We've been taught it's good.
You know, you're just one of those quacks, those crackpots.
As a matter of fact, my cousin gave me some anti-fluoride literature to me
a few years before I went to this conference.
And he said, "Listen, I don't know anything about this.
I've got people that are telling me fluoride's not good.
And you say it's good. Read this stuff."
So he handed me this stuff I read, and I said, "This is garbage. It's good. Fluoride's good."
I mean, I used to believe that too until I got to look at the science.
And you look at the science, and it's indisputable. It's bad.
And it's maybe a minority position, but it's the truth. Fluoride is bad.
It's not a topic that most dentists sit around and talk about anyway.
It only comes up at city council meeting type things.
And I know it was really hard the other night at the city council meeting
because I tell you, several of the dentists that got up there are acquaintances and old friends of mine.
And I'm sure that they find it very discouraging for an old friend, former board member,
to get up there and shame them on what they're doing.
I hate to be in that position.
I mean, there are other people that reverse their positions too
because they have the wherewithal and the guts to examine the literature and say,
"You know, maybe we're wrong about this. Maybe this is true."
And when you start to see the studies and you do the work, you go, "Whoa, this is wrong."
But most dentists are just not doing that. It just isn't happening.
When I first came to Santa Cruz, I was definitely pro-fluoride,
and I was amazed that the patients here didn't want fluoride. I could not believe that.
What do you mean you don't want fluoride? It's good stuff.
And so I met resistance from patients right away, which began to sort of tweak me.
When I worked in Los Angeles, you know, you tell somebody, "You need fluoride. You need this. You need that."
"Okay, doctor, thank you very much."
"Not here. This community questions authority."
And I think that's what it takes.
I was very surprised that patients didn't want it. I couldn't believe it.
You mean you don't want fluoride? Wow.
So, you know, a lot of patients we wouldn't do fluoride for.
But, you know, it was that attitude that caused me to wonder if I was doing things right.
And, you know, as you start looking at it, the patients themselves oftentimes bring the education to the dentist,
and they have to be brave and willing enough to do that,
because the dentists are certainly not going to get the education through their own professional organizations.
So I think if patients persist in bringing this up over and over and over,
perhaps we'll reach critical mass and get what we need to have happen.
I know that we're really harming people, and I also know that my colleagues are very well-intentioned, and they've been misled.
And it's like having, you know, the lone voice in the forest.
And, you know, I don't question that what I'm doing is right or wrong.
I know that what we're doing is right, that this is a bad thing.
And it's just, it's beyond me that intelligent people wouldn't sit down and really take a thoughtful look at this.
You know, that's what I have trouble with.
You know, people who do what I do, they're looking for the truth, you know, and it's about the truth.
I mean, this is insane. This is craziness. It really is.
You know, putting this chemical in the water, I mean, even if we could accept it worked,
why do we have to put everybody else at risk?
When you go and you look at the history about this, this information's been known for 60, 70 years.
It's been repressed, and people, good people, have lost their jobs and their careers just by doing the right thing.
This fluoride controversy has been going on from the get-go.
And people were voicing the same concerns 50 years ago that they're bringing up today.
This isn't new. And the same old, same old, same old.
It's just that the people who want to push this through have just gotten more clever at shoving things through on a legislative basis
and continue to provide more disinformation.
Have I ever debated anybody who was pro-fluoride?
No. You know why? They refuse to show up.
That's how they deal with it. They don't show up. They can't debate it.
They're not ever going to get anybody in the same room with David Kennedy to debate fluoride.
I'll tell you that right now.
He's a walking encyclopedia, and he knows his stuff.
And won't be intimidated. But no, you know, they don't show up.
We've invited them time and time again to be on the radio or have a forum.
No one shows up.
I got involved in fluoridation because as an instructor and a professor and a teaching master in the water treatment training business,
I had a student come to me and say, "You didn't have the right information.
You should take a look at some of the new information."
I was just flabbergasted, and I wondered how many people in the water treatment industry knew how they had been hoodwinked.
So when I started to speak to operators in the last seven years,
I started to tell them about these hazards and the problems with their systems.
And this was echoed in stories told back to me by the operators.
And a lot of operators came to me clandestinely and said, "You know, I also have observed health effects because I've been handling the concentrated form of these chemicals.
I have problems with arthritis-like symptoms.
I can't work in fluoride rooms because when I do, there's a sensitization and I have to be removed."
And I felt that treatment plan operators as a whole weren't being represented.
Nobody was listening to them.
So I started to survey them, and I found out that overwhelmingly,
once they found out the truth about the hazards of the substance they were dealing with and the fact that it really doesn't do what it's supposed to do,
that is dental decay prevention when ingested, many of them questioned whether or not we should be putting that substance in the water.
In fact, emphatically, most of them said, "Let's get it out."
Every time I speak at a public hearing, I'm not seen as some nut job.
I'm seen as somebody who teaches their plant employees, the guy who their people get instruction from,
and those are the same people in their communities that they rely on to provide safe drinking water.
So there's a bit of credibility when I speak, but more importantly, there's awe when they find out the truth of what's going in the drinking water.
Hydrofluosilicic acid, the chemical waste product from the phosphate fertilizer industry.
This is a substance that simply goes from a processing plant into a tanker truck and is delivered to a water treatment plant in my community.
And my counselors, at the time, were astonished that this product could even exist.
And when they asked their own municipal engineers whether this was so, those engineers confirmed the fact.
Believing that the substance that's going in the water is somehow a pharmaceutical grade or some well-prepared, purified extract is completely false.
This stuff comes filled with heavy metals.
I have one certificate of analysis that shows upwards of 34 parts per million of lead in the shipment that was delivered to a municipality, not mine, but just down the road.
And lead is a prohibited substance in the province of Ontario from being added to drinking water.
It doesn't matter that it gets diluted 180,000 times in the process.
Who would stand at the top of a water tower and deliberately add lead and known human carcinogen to the drinking water?
And if I had done that, even as a certified operator, I would have been arrested immediately.
There is no difference except the argument of dilution.
I had spent, let's see, 25 years teaching students at the point I was enlightened.
And my training was that fluoride was a compound simply added to the water for tooth decay prevention.
This was the common thought.
The problem with that is all of the books that were used to educate operators on drinking water treatment processes all said the same thing.
And it was as if they came from some sort of scripted source.
In 1995, I wondered that perhaps we should have more fluoridation throughout the province.
And I began an exploration of the possibility of providing courses to teach operators how to fluoridate the water.
Now it seems incongruous, but at the time it was something I was exploring.
And I was one of the few CDC-trained water engineers who have been able to provide CDC-related training to operators about how to fluoridate drinking water supplies.
So I wasn't speaking from a point of wilderness.
I was speaking from a point of authority with the CDC information fully indoctrinated into my being, going out talking to my students, which were the treatment plant operators.
People tended to trust the expert.
And the problem with trusting the expert is that if the expert makes a mistake, those people end up having a mistaken belief.
And that's exactly what happened.
I used my CDC training to advocate for fluoridation only to find out from one of my students that I was all washed up.
And more importantly, that student was graceful enough to tell me that I was full of crap.
And better than that, I realized that perhaps I didn't have everything that I should have had in my armory of information to teach that I had to go back and learn more.
And when I did, I found out I was wrong.
And there's nothing wrong with being wrong.
The greater wrong is not correcting it.
And that's what I'm doing now, and that's why I speak out about this.
Like everything else, when you find out a truth that's unsettling, I was deeply embarrassed about the crime I had committed, an educational crime I had committed,
for the previous 20 or so thousand students who had heard that fluoridation was fine.
And there's a deep-seated feeling to undo that piece of information in the minds of those individuals.
If I could go back in time and pull that, extract that chunk of information from their mind and replace it with what I know now, I would feel much better.
Fluoridation tends to be a belief system.
And in order to have a belief system, you have to have a creed and you have to have faith.
And the creed has been established by the simple words of safe and effective.
The faith is established by trust us. We're the professionals. We're the doctors. We're the health professionals. We know better.
The reality is, once you start to pick away at the basis for the creed, suddenly the faith is eroded.
And I suppose my job is to change the creed to the point where the faith's eroded enough that people will abandon the faith
and it'll be one of those faith systems that dissolves away into history.
I think water fluoridation's days are numbered. This practice is really a post-World War II practice.
The practice of using asbestos, the practice of thalidomide, the practice of leaded gasoline, the practice of numerous other chemical experiments
that came from rapid chemical growth.
People accepted these modern technological, technochemical developments on faith without question.
My argument with fluoridation in dentists is this.
First of all, no dental authority that I've ever met is qualified to speak about water quality.
And when we're talking about putting hydrofluosalicylic acid as an ingested fluoride product into our bodies through the stomach
with a faint hope that it's going to do something through the saliva on the surface of the teeth
without affecting any other parts of the body, this is just wishful thinking.
So I have said publicly that if you show me a dentist who's qualified beyond what lies in the human body between the chin and the nose,
I'll be glad to listen to them about water quality.
But until that point in time, I'm not going to take my direction from dental authorities or dental trade associations
or the dental unions about water fluoridation.
When they step into the realm of water quality, they're in my world and they're not qualified to talk about it.
99.5% of all of the fluoride that gets put in with the purported use of treating teeth passes right through into the wastewater stream
and back out into the receiving environment.
The main component of hydrofluosalicylic acid is water, 75%.
The other component, the 25%, is the actual hydrofluosalicylic acid active ingredient.
However, there are small percentages also of hydrogen fluoride and heavy metals,
and the heavy metals include primarily lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury.
And the more alarming thing for me are amounts of radionuclides,
which are radioactive components that are scrubbed out of the stack gases.
The entire treatment process is done before hydrofluosalicylic acid gets added,
and then we deliberately degrade it with this stuff.
And when we degrade the water quality, we are not delivering the best water quality that we are capable of.
We're delivering it at some standard that's less.
And I believe tha