This essay originally appeared in the January 1993 issue of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Yes, I confess: I’m a veteran anti-fluoridationist,
thereby – not for the first time – risking placing myself in the camp of
“right-wing kooks and fanatics.” It has always been a bit of mystery to
me why left-environmentalists, who shriek in horror at a bit of Alar on
apples, who cry “cancer” even more absurdly than the boy cried “Wolf,”
who hate every chemical additive known to man, still cast their benign
approval upon fluoride, a highly toxic and probably carcinogenic
substance. And not only let fluoride emissions off the hook, but endorse
uncritically the massive and continuing dumping of fluoride into the
nation’s water supply.
First: the generalized case for and against fluoridation
of water. The case for is almost incredibly thin, boiling down to the
alleged fact of substantial reductions in dental cavities in kids aged 5
to 9. Period. There are no claimed benefits for anyone older than nine! For this the entire adult population of a fluoridated area must be subjected to mass medication!
The case against, even apart from the specific evils of fluoride, is powerful and overwhelming.
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(1) Compulsory mass medication is medically evil, as well as socialistic. It is starkly clear that one key to any medication is control of the dose;
different people, at different stages of risk, need individual dosages
tailored to their needs. And yet with water compulsorily fluoridated,
the dose applies to everyone, and is necessarily proportionate to the
amount of water one drinks.
What is the medical justification for a guy who drinks
ten glasses of water a day receiving ten times the fluorine dose of a
guy who drinks only one glass? The whole process is monstrous as well as
idiotic.
(2) Adults, in fact children over nine, get no benefits
from their compulsory medication, yet they imbibe fluorides
proportionately to their water intake.
(3) Studies have shown that while kids 5 to 9 may have their cavities reduced by fluoridation, said kids ages 9 to 12 have more cavities, so that after 12 the cavity benefits disappear. So that, at best, the question boils down to: are we to subject ourselves to the possible dangers of fluoridation solely to save dentists the irritation of dealing with squirming kids aged 5 to 9?
(4) Any parents who want to give their kids the dubious benefits of fluoridation can do so individually:
by giving their kids fluoride pills, with doses regulated instead of
haphazardly proportionate to the kids’ thirst; and/or, as we all know,
they can brush their teeth with fluoride-added toothpaste. How about
freedom of individual choice?
(5) Let us not omit the long-suffering taxpayer, who has
to pay for the hundreds of thousands of tons of fluorides poured into
the nation’s socialized water supply every year. The days of private
water companies, once flourishing in the U.S., are long gone, although
the market, in recent years, has popped up in the form of increasingly
popular private bottled water even though far more expensive than
socialized free
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water.
Nothing loony or kooky about any of these arguments, is
there? So much for the general case pro and con fluoridation. When we
get to the specific ills of fluoridation, the case against becomes even
more overpowering, as well as grisly.
During the 1940s and 50s, when the successful push for
fluoridation was underway, the pro-forces touted the controlled
experiment of Newburgh and Kingston, two neighboring small cities in
upstate New York, with much the same demographics. Newburgh had been
fluoridated and Kingston had not, and the powerful pro-fluoridation
Establishment trumpeted the fact that ten years later, dental cavities
in kids 5 to 9 in Newburgh were considerably lower than in Kingston
(originally, the rates of every disease had been about the same in the
two places). OK, but the antis raising the disquieting fact that, after
ten years, both the cancer and the heart disease rates were now
significantly higher in Newburgh. How did the Establishment treat this
criticism? By dismissing it as irrelevant, as kooky scare tactics. Oh?
Why were these and later problems and charges ignored
and overridden, and why the rush to judgment to inflict fluoridation on
America? Who was behind this drive, and how did the opponents acquire
the “right-wing kook” image?
THE DRIVE FOR FLUORIDATION
The official drive began abruptly just before the end of
World War II, pushed by the U.S. Public Health Service, then in the
Treasury Department. In 1945, the federal government selected two
Michigan cities to conduct an official “15-year” study; one city, Grand
Rapids, was fluoridated, a control city was left unfluoridated. (I am
indebted to a recent revisionist article on fluoridation by the medical
writer Joel Griffiths, in the left-wing muckraking journal Covert Action Information Bulletin:
“Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?” [Fall 1992], pp. 26-28,
63-66.) Yet, before five years were up, the government killed its own
“scientific study,” by fluoridating the water in the second city in
Michigan. Why? Under the excuse that its action was caused by “popular
demand” for fluoridation; as we shall see, the “popular
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demand” was generated by the government and the Establishment
itself. Indeed, as early as 1946, under the federal campaign, six
American cities fluoridated their water, and 87 more joined the
bandwagon by 1950.
A key figure in the successful drive for fluoridation
was Oscar R. Ewing, who was appointed by President Truman in 1947 as
head of the Federal Security Agency, which encompassed the Public Health
Service (PHS), and which later blossomed into our beloved Cabinet
office of Health, Education, and Welfare. One reason for the left’s
backing of fluoridation – in addition to its being socialized medicine
and mass medication, for them a good in itself – was that Ewing was a
certified Truman Fair Dealer and leftist, and avowed proponent of
socialized medicine, a high official in the then-powerful Americans for
Democratic Action, the nation’s central organization of “anti-Communist
liberals” (read: Social Democrats or Mensheviks). Ewing mobilized not
only the respectable left but also the Establishment Center. The
powerful drive for compulsory fluoridation was spearheaded by the PHS,
which soon mobilized the nation’s establishment organizations of
dentists and physicians.
The mobilization, the national clamor for fluoridation,
and the stamping of opponents with the right-wing kook image, was all
generated by the public relations man hired by Oscar Ewing to direct the
drive. For Ewing hired none other than Edward L. Bernays, the man with
the dubious honor of being called the “father of public relations.”
Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was called “The Original Spin
Doctor” in an admiring article in the Washington Post on the
occasion of the old manipulator’s 100th birthday in late 1991. The fact
that right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society correctly called
fluoridation “creeping socialism” and blamed Soviet Communism as the
source of the fluoridation campaign (no, not Bolsheviks, guys: but a Menshevik-State Capitalist alliance, see below) was used by the Bernaysians to discredit all the opposition.
As a retrospective scientific article pointed out about
the fluoridation movement, one of its widely distributed dossiers listed
opponents of fluoridation “in alphabetical order reputable scientists,
convicted felons, food faddists, scientific organizations, and the Ku
Klux Klan.”
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(Bette Hileman, “Fluoridation of Water,” Chemical and Engineering News 66 [August 1, 1988], p. 37; quoted in Griffiths, p. 63) In his 1928 book Propaganda,
Bernays laid bare the devices he would use: Speaking of the “mechanism
which controls the public mind,” which people like himself could
manipulate, Bernays added that “Those who manipulate the unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the
true ruling power of our country…our minds are molded, our tastes
formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…” And
the process of manipulating leaders of groups, “either with or without
their conscious cooperation,” will “automatically influence” the members
of such groups.
In describing his practices as PR man for Beech-Nut
Bacon, Bernays tells how he would suggest to physicians to say publicly
that “it is wholesome to eat bacon.” For, Bernays added, he “knows as a
mathematical certainty that large numbers of persons will follow the
advice of their doctors because he (the PR man) understands the
psychological relationship of dependence of men on their physicians.”
(Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda [New York: Liveright, 1928], pp.
9, 18, 49, 53. Quoted in Griffiths, p.63) Add “dentists” to the
equation, and substitute “fluoride” for “bacon,” and we have the essence
of the Bernays propaganda campaign.
Before the Bernays campaign, fluoride was largely known
in the public mind as the chief ingredient of bug and rat poison; after
the campaign, it was widely hailed as a safe provider of healthy teeth
and gleaming smiles.
After the 1950s, it was all mopping up – the
fluoridation forces had triumphed, and two-thirds of the nation’s
reservoirs were fluoridated. There are still benighted areas of the
country left however (California is less than 16 percent fluoridated)
and the goal of the federal government and its PHS remains as “universal
fluoridation.”
DOUBTS CUMULATE
Despite the blitzkrieg victory, however, doubts have
surfaced and gathered in the scientific community. Fluoride is a
non-biodegradable
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substance, which, in people, accumulates in teeth and bone –
perhaps strengthening kiddies’ teeth; but what about human bones? Two
crucial bone problems of fluorides – brittleness and cancer – began to
appear in studies, only to be systematically blocked by governmental
agencies. As early as 1956, a federal study found nearly twice as many
premalignant bone defects in young males in Newbergh as in unfluoridated
Kingston; but this finding was quickly dismissed as “spurious.”
Oddly enough, despite the 1956 study and carcinogenic
evidence popping up since the 1940s, the federal government never
conducted its own beloved animal carcinogenicity test on fluorides.
Finally, in 1975, biochemist John Yiamouyiannis and Dean Berk, a retired
official of the federal government’s own National Cancer Institute
(NCI), presented a paper before the annual meeting of the American
Society of Biological Chemists. The paper reported a 5 to 10 percent
increase in total cancer rates in those U.S. cities which had
fluoridated their water. The findings were disputed, but triggered
congressional hearings two years later, where the government revealed to
shocked Congressmen that it had never tested fluoride for cancer.
Congress ordered the NCI to conduct such tests.
Talk about foot-dragging! Incredibly, it took the NCI
twelve years to finish its tests, finding “equivocal evidence” that
fluoride caused bone cancer in male rats. Under further direction of
Congress, the NCI studied cancer trends in the U.S., and found
nationwide evidence of “a rising rate of bone and joint cancer at all
ages,” especially in youth, in counties that had fluoridated their
water, but no such rise was seen in “non-fluoridated” counties.
In more detailed studies, for areas of Washington state
and Iowa, NCI found that from the 1970s to the 1980s bone cancer for
males under 20 had increased by 70 percent in the fluoridated areas of
these states, but had decreased by 4 percent in the
non-fluoridated areas. Sounds pretty conclusive to me, but the NCI set
some fancy statisticians to work on the data, to conclude that these
findings, too, were “spurious.” Dispute over this report drove the
federal government to one of its favorite ploys in virtually every area:
the allegedly expert, bipartisan, “value-free” commission.
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The government had already done the commission bit in
1983, when disturbing studies on fluoridation drove our old friend the
PHS to form a commission of “world-class experts” to review safety data
on fluorides in water. Interestingly, the panel found to its grave
concern that most of the alleged evidence of fluoride’s safety scarcely
existed. The 1983 panel recommended caution on fluoride exposure for
children. Interestingly, the panel strongly recommended that the
fluoride content of drinking water be no greater than two parts per
million for children up to nine, because of worries about the fluoride
effect on children’s skeletons, and potential heart damage.
The chairman of the panel, Jay R. Shapiro of the
National Institute of Health, warned the members, however, that the PHS
might “modify” the findings, since “the report deals with sensitive
political issues.” Sure enough, when Surgeon General Everett Koop
released the official report a month later, the federal government had
thrown out the panel’s most important conclusions and recommendations,
without consulting the panel. Indeed, the panel never received copies of
the final, doctored, version. The government’s alterations were all in a
pro-fluoride direction, claiming that there was no “scientific
documentation” of any problems at fluoride levels below 8 parts per
million.
In addition to the bone cancer studies for the late
1980s, evidence is piling up that fluorides lead to bone fractures. In
the past two years, no less than eight epidemiological studies have
indicated the fluoridation has increased the rate of bone fractures in
males and females of all ages. Indeed, since 1957, the bone fracture
rate among male youth has increased sharply in the United States, and
the U.S. hip fracture rate is now the highest in the world. In fact, a
study in the traditionally pro-fluoride Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), August 12, 1992, found that even “low levels of fluoride may increase the risk of hip fracture in the elderly.” JAMAconcluded that “it is now appropriate to revisit the issue of water fluoridation.”
Clearly, it was high time for another federal
commission. During 1990-91, a new commission, chaired by veteran PHS
official and long-time pro-fluoridationist Frank E. Young, predictably
concluded that “no evidence” was found associating fluoride and cancer.
On bone fractures, the commission blandly stated that “further studies
are required.” But no further studies or soul-searching were needed for
its conclusion: “The U.S. Public Health Service should continue to
support optimal fluoridation of drinking water.” Presumably, they did
not conclude that “optimal” meant zero.
Despite the Young whitewash, doubts are piling up even
within the federal government. James Huff, a director of the U.S.
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, concluded in 1992
that animals in the government’s study developed cancer, especially bone
cancer from being given fluoride – and there was nothing “equivocal”
about his conclusion.
Various scientists for the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) have turned to anti-fluoridation toxicologist William
Marcus’s warning that fluoride causes not just cancer, but also bone
fractures, arthritis, and other disease. Marcus mentions, too, that an
unreleased study by the New Jersey Health Department (a state where only
15 percent of the population is fluoridated) shows that the bone cancer
rate among young males is no less than six times higher in fluoridated
than in non-fluoridated areas.
Even coming into question is the long-sacred idea that
fluoridated water at least lowers cavities in children five to nine.
Various top pro-fluoridationists highly touted for their expertise were
suddenly and bitterly condemned when further study led them to the
conclusion that the dental benefits are really negligible. New Zealand’s
most prominent pro-fluoridationist was the country’s top dental
officer, Dr. John Colquhoun.
As chairman of the Fluoridation Promotion Committee,
Colquhoun decided to gather statistics to show doubters the great merits
of fluoridation. To his shock, he found that the percentage of children
free of dental decay was higher in the non-fluoridated part than
in the fluoridated part of New Zealand. The national health department
refused to allow Colquhoun to publish these findings, and kicked him out
as dental director. Similarly, a top pro-fluoridationist in British
Columbia, Canada, Richard G. Foulkes, concluded that fluoridation is not
only dangerous, but that it is not even effective in reducing tooth
decay. Foulkes was denounced by former colleagues as a propagandist
“promoting the quackery of anti-fluoridationists.”
WHY THE FLUORIDATION DRIVE?
Since the case for compulsory fluoridation is so flimsy,
and the case against so overwhelming, the final step is to ask: why?
Why did the Public Health Service get involved in the first place? How
did this thing get started? Here we must keep our eye on the pivotal
role of Oscar R. Ewing, for Ewing was far more than just a social
democrat Fair Dealer.
Fluoride has long been recognized as one of the most
toxic elements found in the earth’s crust. Fluorides are by-products of
many industrial processes, being emitted in the air and water, and
probably the major source of this by-product is the aluminum industry.
By the 1920s and 1930s, fluorine was increasingly being subject to
lawsuits and regulations. In particular, by 1938 the important,
relatively new aluminum industry was being placed on a wartime footing.
What to do if its major by-product is a dangerous poison?
The time had come for damage control; even better, to
reverse the public image of this menacing substance. The Public Health
Service, remember was under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department,
and treasury secretary all during the 1920s and until 1931 was none
other than billionaire Andrew J. Mellon, founder and head of the
powerful Mellon interests, “Mr. Pittsburgh,” and founder and virtual
ruler of the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA), the dominant firm
in the aluminum industry.
In 1931, the PHS sent a dentist named H. Trendley Dean
to the West to study the effects of concentrations of naturally
fluoridated water on people’s teeth. Dean found that towns high in
natural fluoride seemed to have fewer cavities. This news galvanized
various Mellon scientists into action. In particular, the Mellon
Institute, ALCOA’s research lab in Pittsburgh, sponsored a study in
which biochemist Gerald J. Cox fluoridated some lab rats, decided that
cavities in those rats had been reduced and immediately concluded that
“the case (that fluoride reduces cavities) should be regarded as
proved.” Instant science!
The following year, 1939, Cox, the ALCOA scientist
working for a company beset by fluoride damage claims, made the first
public proposal for mandatory fluoridation of water. Cox proceeded to
stump the country urging fluoridation. Meanwhile, other ALCOA-funded
scientists trumpeted the alleged safety of fluorides, in particular the
Kettering Laboratory of the University of Cincinnati.
During World War II, damage claims for fluoride
emissions piled up as expected, in proportion to the great expansion of
aluminum production during the war. But attention from these claims was
diverted, when, just before the end of the war, the PHS began to push
hard for compulsory fluoridation of water. Thus the drive for compulsory
fluoridation of water accomplished two goals in one shot: it
transformed the image of fluorine from a curse to a blessing that will
strengthen every kid’s teeth, and it provided a steady and substantial
monetary demand for fluorides to dump annually into the nation’s water.
One interesting footnote to this story is that whereas fluorine in naturally fluoridated water comes in the form of calcium fluoride, the substance dumped into every locality is instead sodium
fluoride. The Establishment defense that “fluoride is fluoride” becomes
unconvincing when we consider two points: (a) calcium is notoriously
good for bones and teeth, so the anti-cavity effect in naturally
fluoridated water might well be due to the calcium and not the fluorine;
and (b) sodium fluoride happens to be the major by-product of the
manufacture of aluminum.
Which
brings us to Oscar R. Ewing. Ewing arrived in Washington in 1946,
shortly after the initial PHS push began, arriving there as long-time
counsel, now chief counsel, for ALCOA, making what was then an
astronomical legal fee of $750,000 a year (something like $7,000,000 a
year in present dollars). A year later, Ewing took charge of the Federal
Security Agency, which included the PHS, and waged the successful
national drive for water fluoridation. After a few years, having
succeeded in his campaign, Ewing stepped down from public service, and
returned to private life, including his chief counselship of the
Aluminum Corporation of America.
There is an instructive lesson in this little saga, a
lesson how and why the Welfare State came to America. It came as an
alliance of three major forces: ideological social democrats, ambitious
technocratic bureaucrats, and Big Businessmen seeking privileges from
the State. In the fluoridation saga, we might call the whole process
“ALCOA-socialism.” The Welfare State redounds to the welfare not of most
of society but of these particular venal and exploitative groups.
Ed.: See also, from 2005, Fluoride Follies by Donald W. Miller, MD.
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