16. Hurricane Creek The People Rule: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

Hurricane Creek 

The People Rule 



Scientists have been villains in this story. Robert Kehoe and Harold Hodge 
buried important research and misled the general public. But scientists 
have been heroes, too. The pioneering work of Kaj Roholm and George 
Waldbott in unmasking fluoride s potential for harm was a principled 
effort to explore fluoride's role in our biology and biosphere. More 
recently we can see a similar heroic journey in that of Phyllis Mullenix. 
When her research revealed that fluoride in low doses has effects on the 
central nervous system, she was fired from her job as the head of the 
toxicology department at the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, and her 
industry funding dried up. 

Mullenix has since immersed herself in the medical literature about 
fluoride and has appeared as an expert witness in several trials in which 
fluoride was alleged to have injured workers. Although the number of men 
and women exposed to fluoride in the workplace is enormous — and as we 
have seen in the data from the Kettering dog study, those workers are likely 
to have fluoride-induced injuries — nevertheless, fifty years of assurances 
by the Public Health Service that fluoride in small amounts is good and 
safe for children make winning damage lawsuits an uphill and often 
thankless task. 

PHYLLIS MULLENIX TOOK her seat on the stand beneath the giant seal of the 
state of Arkansas mounted high on the court-room wall. The seal, 
inscribed in Latin, read Regnat Populus — "The 



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People Rule." The jury leaned forward. Presiding Circuit Court Judge 
Grisham Phillips peered over his glasses. All eyes were on the female 
toxicologist and the anticipated confrontation with the tall redheaded 
attorney Harry M. "Pete" Johnson III, who was now approaching the 
bench. 

Mullenix had changed careers. Since being fired in 1994 she had become 
perhaps the most prominent scientist in the United States testifying in 
damage cases about the health risks she saw from low-level fluoride 
exposure. Mullenix had spoken with sick uranium and aluminum workers 
in Tennessee and Washington State, met with poisoned Mohawk Indians in 
New York, and testified in several court cases, helping to win financial 
settlements for a crippled chemical worker in Georgia and a 
water-treatment-plant operator in Arkansas. Despite these occasional legal 
successes, Mullenix believes that doctors and citizens share a blind spot in 
not viewing fluoride as a chemical poison and an industrial pollutant. The 
problem with fluoride is that it is not recognized for what it is. First people 
think of toothpaste and second they think of drinking water. They have 
totally ignored the fluoride industry and fluoride workers." 

In October 2000, back in Arkansas again, Mullenix found herself in the 
crosshairs of one of the nations most powerful corporations, the Reynolds 
Metals Company of Richmond, Virginia; as we have seen, Reynolds has a 
long history of fighting fluoride pollution claims and good reason to fear 
having the chemical more widely recognized as a workplace poison. 
Reynolds had been one of the principal supporters, and beneficiaries, of 
Robert Kehoes fluoride research at the Kettering Laboratory. Now 
Mullenix was an expert witness for a group of fifty workers suing Reynolds, 
part of a much larger group of several hundred workers, who also alleged 
that their health had been damaged while working at the company's Hurri- 
cane Creek worksite. 1 

One of the workers was Diane Peebles. The thirty-five-year-old mother 
of two sat quietly at the back of the Saline County courtroom in Benton 
throughout the October trial. Since working as a driver at Hurricane Creek 
in 1995 and 1996, a bizarre spectrum of physical and mental problems had 
dogged her. Her blood pressure had begun fluctuating wildly, and she had 
experienced powerful mood swings as well as "lots of headaches and 
stomach problems," with 



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near constant exhaustion and pain in her joints. The aching never stops. I 
wish I had the energy that other people have, she added. 

Diane s husband, Scotty Peebles, had taken the witness stand. The 
stocky, tattooed laborer told the jury that his health had also collapsed in 
just six months at the Hurricane Creek site. He had been operating heavy 
machinery in order to bury chemical waste in giant pits. Scotty Peebles 
shared many symptoms with Diane and the other workers. His lung 
capacity had been cut almost in half, and his bones had lost mineral density, 
medical tests showed. His skin had burned bright red and his nose filled 
with painful blisters at the work site, he testified. Although he had not 
worked at Hurricane Creek for almost three years, twenty-nine-year-old 
Scotty Peebles's joints still ached and he, too, was plagued with mysterious 
headaches and stomach problems, he told the court. 

Sitting at the Peebles's kitchen table one October morning during the 
trial, the soft-spoken Diane suddenly burst into tears. Scotty sat silent, his 
hand gripping a coffee cup. "It's hard," she blurted out. The strain on the 
family was sometimes overwhelming, Diane said. Several scientists, 
including Dr. Mullenix, had testified about the serious and often long-term 
health risks from fluoride. "The kids want to know, "Are you sick 
mom — are you and Dad gonna die?' We tell them we are not going 
anywhere. I hate having to lie to my children, because I don't know myself. 
I want to make sure that they are taken care of. That is my biggest 
fear — because if we are not able to take care of our kids, who is going to?" 

Reynolds Metals had hired big-time lawyers to fight the Hurricane 
Creek workers' claim. Attorney Pete Johnson was from the Virginia-based 
firm of Hunton &Williams, who since 1910 had defended Standard Oil, 
Phillip Morris, and a host of banking, electric utility, and railroad 
companies. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. had once been a 
partner, and the firm had a reputation in the legal world of having a 
Southern "old boy" culture. Pete Johnson fitted the mold. The University of 
Virginia law school graduate was one of Hunton & Williams's younger 
members, but he had already defended clients in "toxic tort" cases of 
asbestos and lead poisoning. As Johnson approached the bench and opened 
his files, Phyllis Mullenix closed her eyes. She smiled, bracing herself, 
while recalling the words of her husband, Rick, when she had left Boston. 



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The Reynolds lawyers, he had warned, are going to chew on your ass 
a while, but youve got more ass than they ve got teeth. 

The duel between Mullenix and Johnson over one of the most 
critical legal issues that had ever faced U.S. industry — fluoride dam- 
age to human health — was being fought, fittingly enough, near one of 
the most historic industrial sites in the United States. Only four miles 
from the Benton courthouse, Hurricane Creeks red earth once 
contained some of the nation's richest deposits of bauxite, the raw 
mineral needed to make aluminum. The Aluminum Company of 
America had built the nearby company town of Bauxite in the early 
19005 to house migrant miners. A National Park Service plaque at the 
Bauxite museum commemorates the regions vital role in making 
aluminum for aircraft during World War U. 

In October 2000 Benton was ready to make history again. The court case 
filed by the Hurricane Creek workers was closely linked to what EPA 
officials call the largest and most environmentally significant waste 
disposal issue facing aluminum producers in the United States.' 

The material Scotty Peebles had been burying at Hurricane Creek was a 
toxic by-product of making aluminum, a waste known as treated spent 
potliner. The EPA had taken an intense interest in the waste. Each year 
about 120,000 tons of spent potliner are produced by the aluminum 
industry in the United States.' The waste is impregnated with a witch's brew 
of fluoride, arsenic, and cyanide. Disposing of it has long been a financial 
headache for manufacturers — and a flashpoint for conflict with 
environmental regulators. There is so much of it and it is somewhat 
awkward to treat," noted Steve Silverman of the EPAs Office of General 
Counsel. 

Once, ugly black mountains of waste potliner — literally, the waste 
lining of the steel pots in which the aluminum is smelted — had been stored 
on site or buried in pits, leaching fluoride and other poisons into 
groundwater, and winning toxic Superfund status for several aluminum 
plants across the country, a federal designation that targets the hazardous 
site for clean-up.' But by the early 1990s Reynolds told the EPA that the 
company had solved the potliner problem. It had invented a process at the 
Hurricane Creek site to treat the waste, heating it with sand and lime in 
giant furnaces at temperatures of over 1,100 degrees, driving off the 
cyanide, and then binding the 



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fluoride to the sand and limestone as calcium fluoride. 

Hurricane Creek workers Jerry Jones and Alan Williams helped to 
develop that Reynolds treatment process — becoming, they now believe, 
two more unwitting victims of industrial fluoride poisoning. In 1988 the 
two laborers had been part of a work crew of several hundred men that 
greeted a mighty procession of loo-ton railroad "hopper" cars arriving in 
Arkansas, hauling potliner waste from aluminum companies in New York, 
Oregon, and Canada. The experimental treatment plant ran day and night, 
coiling a plume of black smoke across Saline County. Jerry Jones would 
climb into the railroad cars, smashing a sledgehammer to loosen the 
foul-smelling material while wearing only a bandana across his face for 
protection from the billowing dust. "We knew we were dealing with 
something awful," he added. "Your sweat would burn, and the stuff 
smelled just horrendous." 

Safety questions drew blunt responses from the Reynolds s contractors, 
the men recalled. Recession was biting Arkansas hard in the early 1990s, 
and both Jerry Jones and Alan Williams had young children to feed. "I was 
told to either god-dammed do it, or hit the fucking gate,' because they had 
over a thousand applications at the office of people waiting to take our 
jobs," said Jones. "They did not tell us one thing [about safety]." 

Alan Williams is a thick-necked former U.S. Marine with a college 
degree. He became a foreman at Hurricane Creek. He had always been 
"super physical," he said, but the forty-five-year-old quickly ran into health 
troubles while at the Reynolds site. "I wasn't sure what the problem was," 
he said. "My gums had begun to shrink. I quit smoking. I was having chest 
pains and rashes all over my body. I looked like an alcoholic and I don't 
hardly drink. It was covering my legs anti arms and I was having joint pain. 
My sex is gone. I'm impotent. It just wasted me away," he said.' 

By December 1991 the new treatment process was ready. Reynolds 
assured the EPA the "treated" spent potliner waste would not leach fluoride 
into ground water at levels the EPA deemed unsafe. That year the treated 
potliner was removed from the agency's list of toxic materials and "lost its 
hazardous waste stigma," according to Michelle Peace, an EPA 
environmental engineer who handled the delisting" process. 



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The EPA ruling that the treated potliner was not hazardous was a 
financial windfall for Reynolds Metals. Instead of paying for the 
disposal of tens of thousands of tons of highly toxic waste, the company 
was now permitted to bury up to 300,000 cubic yards of the " treated" 
material each year in giant unlined pits at Hurricane Creek where, 
according to Peace, "there was no real associated costs with disposing 
of that material." 

The EPA may have ruled the material safe, but to workers like Scotty 
Peebles, the acrid dust that filled his truck cab each day was loathsome. 
Reynolds was experimenting with the treated pot-liner waste as 
commercial road-grading material, which was called ALROC. It was 
Peebles's job to haul the ALROC fluoride waste around the site for the 
test roads. He began to notice changes in the environment after he had 
begun this process. "It killed all the trees and the grass," Peebles said. "I 
used to see a lot of deer, then you didn't see too many come around any 
more." 

Reynolds had assured the EPA that fluoride leaching from the treated" 
waste would be less than 48 parts per million. But an environmental audit 
by an EPA contractor found levels at 2,400 parts per million — fluoride 
levels that "would have impacted human health and the environment," 
according to Michelle Peace. Nevertheless, the extraordinary difference 
between what Reynolds had promised and what it actually delivered was an 
honest difference of technique, not a deliberate effort to mislead the 
government regulators, according to Peace. "[Reynolds] ran the [initial] 
test as appropriately as they could." 

The attorney for the Hurricane Creek workers, Bruce McMath, didn't 
buy it. He claimed that Reynolds had "hoodwinked" the EPA from the 
beginning. He showed the Benton jury a Reynolds memo proving, he said, 
that the company had concealed the truth from the federal regulators.' 
"They knew the treatment process was not going to achieve what they were 
representing to the EPA it would achieve — or at least, how they knew the 
EPA was interpreting the data they were giving them." He also noted that 
Reynolds had hired a former top EPA official to work behind the scenes 
and help to get the treated potliner delisted. "These corporations have such 
sustained and long-term working relationships with these agencies," 
McMath said. "It becomes very difficult for you to overcome that." 



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Michelle Peace conceded that the EPA had difficulty in evaluating the 
human-health significance of the revised test data. Her comments are 
revealing. While the amount of poison leaching into groundwater from the 
treated potliner was definitely the greatest for fluoride, nevertheless the 
agency still saw the cyanide and the arsenic in the waste as the greater 
health hazard, remarked Peace. Once again industry's historic investment 
in efforts to spin fluoride's image as good for teeth, and to hide its impact as 
a pollutant and worker poison, had paid a handsome dividend. "Nobody 
ever jumped up and down" at the fluoride results, explained Peace. "You 
need that for your teeth." 8 

The idea that fluoride could be harmful to humans came as no surprise 
to Reynolds Metals. Nor was the company a stranger to the notion that 
fluoride s role in dental health could influence the thinking of regulators 
and jurors. The Reynolds legal team in Arkansas had spent impressive 
funds in preparation for the October 2000 trial. That fall morning, 
however, as defense attorney Pete Johnson strode to the bench to begin 
his cross-examination of toxicologist Phyllis Mullenix, he pointed to the 
weapon he would use to defend his client. It cost less than four dollars. 
On the evidence table in full view of Judge Grisham Phillips and the 
Benton jury, lay a single item — a thin red box of Colgate fluoride 
toothpaste. 

Johnson approached Mullenix and smiled. He held up the toothpaste 
tube like a trophy. "You wouldn't brush your teeth ... with Col -gate 
toothpaste, would you, or any toothpaste, for that matter, where they put 
fluoride in it. Is that right?" Johnson asked Mullenix. 

"That's right," the scientist said. 

Johnsons legal strategy was familiar. Like the Reynolds lawyer 
Frederic Yerke in the Martin trial, forty-five years earlier, Johnson now 
used water fluoridation as a legal defense, pouring scorn on the notion 
that a chemical added to public water supplies, on behalf of children, 
could possibly have hurt the Hurricane Creek workers. He raised a 
polystyrene cup at Mullenix in a theatrical gesture, like a trophy, and 
slowly sipped the water in front of the jurors. 

You wouldnt drink the water in this courtroom on a regular basis like 
the folks who work here? Johnson asked the scientist. You wouldnt do 
that, would you? 



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If I could afford to go out and buy the bottled water, I would do so, 
Mullenix answered. 

Hundreds of workers had breathed fluoride dust at the Hurricane Creek 
plant. The EPA had ordered Reynolds to clean up the site.' The federal 
Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) had fined a Hurricane 
Creek contractor for not providing safety equipment and training. Workers 
alleged serious injury: their bones ached, their lungs gasped for air, 
weeping sores erupted on flayed red skin, and some employees vomited in 
the morning before work.]" But Reynolds's attorney Johnson continued to 
drill away at the issue of water fluoridation. Mullenix was a loopy dissident, 
he inferred, out of step with the U.S. Surgeon General, the Public Health 
Service, and the Centers for Disease Control, all of whom, the jury was 
reminded, had endorsed fluoridation. It was a legal strategy, trusted and 
true, that Alcoa's Frank Seamans and his Fluorine Lawyers had understood, 
a generation before young Pete Johnson had contemplated going to law 
school. 

"In fact," Johnson now said, with a whiff of condescension, "you think 
that there ought to be a warning sign at the water fountain here outside the 
courtroom about all the health effects it can cause. Is that right?" 

"If someone asked me for my advice, would I drink it, I would say 
no, Mullenix said. But I m not into parading posters or putting labels 
or warnings up anywhere, she added. 

But Johnson soldiered on. Did Mullenix believe, he asked, that 
fluoridated water was responsible for "thyroid, memory, suicide, 
depression, neurological [problems], ulcers, stomach problems, eye 
problems . . . and ear problems?" 

It wasnt that simple, Mullenix responded. The scientist explained 
that most people now received fluoride from multiple sources, not just 
drinking water. Many foods also frequently contained high levels of 
fluoride, especially food that was processed and irrigated with 
fluoridated water. Many agricultural fertilizers contained fluoride. 
Some popular medications, such as Prozac, were made with fluoride. 
And workers at numerous industrial sites, such as Hurricane Creek, 
continued to breathe fluoride at potentially unsafe levels. 

You have to look at the total body burden, Mullenix told the 

jury. 



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"The drinking water is a contributor to the total body burden. And then you 
have to look at the exposure totally and how it adds up. 

The jury listened as Johnson continued. Youre against putting fluoride 
in drinking water because of the medical problems it can cause. ... Is that 
right? You are opposed to that? he asked. 

I really didnt have an opinion about fluoride, Dr. Mullenix answered, 
until I had done studies and investigations of it . . . but after doing the 
studies and considering the health impacts, I would not recommend it as a 
good practice." 

Then Bruce McMath, the workers' attorney for whom Mullenix was an 
expert witness, walked to the front of the court and handed Judge Grisham 
Phillips the medical study on the group of beagles, which Reynolds had 
commissioned at the Kettering Laboratory in 1962. He also gave the judge 
letters between company officials and the Kettering Laboratory's director, 
Dr. Robert Kehoe, discussing the research." McMath explained that during 
the pretrial phase known as discovery, he had asked Reynolds for any 
company documents about fluoride and its health effects. The company 
had not given him the Kettering fluoride study, the very study he was now 
handing to the judge. As Judge Phillips took the long-ago documents from 
the workers attorney, Reynolds s past appeared to have caught up with it. 
The documents linked Reynolds to a medical cover-up, illustrating that 
scientific information about fluorides harmful effects had been suppressed 
for almost half a century. 

It was as if fireworks had erupted in the middle of the courtroom. 
Reynolds s lawyer, Pete Johnson, quickly intervened, walking briskly to 
the front of the court, huddling with the Judge and hissing at McMath in 
stage whispers. Reynolds objected to the Kettering study s being admitted 
as evidence, he said. Johnson was especially outraged at any suggestion 
that the big aluminum company had " buried the documents or somehow 
failed to produce documents that it had in its possession, he told Judge 
Phillips. 

McMath fought back. Your Honor, he insisted. Reynolds had 
obviously suppressed the health study. "We asked them to produce all their 
documents, McMath told the Judge, including studies ... which pertained 
to or consisted of human and animal health effects upon exposure to 
fluoride. And of course, this document is 
not in there. 



HURRICANE CREEK 21 1 



McMath wanted the jury to know that Reynolds had commissioned the 
study in the wake of a fluoride -pollution lawsuit, hidden the results, and 
then, forty years later, failed to turn the research over to the injured 
Hurricane Creek workers. They had hidden it twice, McMath said. To the 
great distress of McMath and his workers, Judge Phillips banned that 
argument. Mullenix could discuss the contents of the Kettering study, the 
Judge ruled, but McMath could not tell the jury about the long-ago Martin 
lawsuit, or that Reynolds had attempted to keep the study secret.' It was a 
bitter pill for the plaintiffs' attorney. "I thought that they deserved to face 
that in the court, before the jury, McMath protested. 

A moment of truth in the Arkansas trial did come, however, when 
attorney Johnson questioned Phyllis Mullenix about Scotty Peebles s 
breathing problems. The waste Peebles had handled at the Hurricane Creek 
site had contained calcium fluoride, the same chemical that had injured the 
long-ago Kettering beagle dogs. Peebles said that the foul-smelling dust 
had filled the cab of his front-end loader, grabbing at his lungs, burning his 
skin, and inflicting painful headaches. It was getting in your hair. You 
would literally breathe this stuff in, he added. 

A doctor diagnosed the twenty-eight-year-old with emphysema. 
Peebles s lung capacity was almost halved, tests showed. Many other 
Hurricane Creek workers also showed decreased lung capacity. 

Mullenix explained how the fluoride dust used in the Kettering 
experiment had caused lung damage in dogs. Would the same dust hurt 
workers such as Scotty Peebles at the Hurricane Creek work site, the 
workers lawyer McMath asked? 

"Yes," replied Mullenix. 

Later that day Reynolds's attorney Johnson attempted to shoot down 
this diagnosis during his cross-examination of Mullenix. 

"Are you saying that Mr. Peebles's emphysema was caused by 
fluoride . . . from Hurricane Creek? Johnson asked. 

Certainly, said Mullenix. 

But Johnson oozed confidence. He had researched the published 
medical literature thoroughly. In all those articles you showed us and all 
these references you gave us, he continued, do you have any reference 
that says that fluoride causes or contributes to 
emphysema? 



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Johnson turned, grandly, to the jury. It is getting late he reminded them. 
He swiveled back to Mullenix. Do you have an article in all of the stuff 
you have brought and collected that says, We did a study and we found 
that fluoride causes the disease emphysema? he asked. 

Mullenix played her trump card. In the Kettering study that we 
presented earlier, in the pathology reports, the microscopic examination, 
they use [the term] emphysema lesions, she said. They use the word 
"emphysema,' yes." 

Johnson adjusted his glasses. He seemed startled. "You're saying in the 
Kettering study in the dogs?" His voice trailed off. "In the dogs," 
Mullenix repeated. 

"In the dogs." Johnson looked at his notes. 
"That's correct," said Mullenix. 

Judge and jury looked on. The Reynolds lawyer sounded almost 
incredulous. Animal experiments had connected workers lung injuries 
with fluoride? He looked at the bench where his legal support team sat. 
They stared back. 

"They found emphysema, this disease emphysema was caused by 
fluoride?" Johnson repeated. 

The pathologists report, in looking at the tissues, said there were 
emphysematous changes, and that's what was reported," said Mullenix. 

"Okay. All right," the Reynolds lawyer finally conceded. 

Although Judge Phillips prevented attorney Bruce McMath from telling 
the Arkansas jury about the long-ago Martin trial — and why the Kettering 
fluoride research had been commissioned by Reynolds — several former 
Hurricane Creek workers sitting in the courtroom that Friday afternoon 
understood what had just taken place. 

"I didn't find out 'til yesterday that Reynolds had known anything about 
[fluoride's inhalation effects]," said Jerry Jones, who had begun working at 
Hurricane Creek in 1988. "Reynolds had conducted a research test about 
fluoride in 1962. We should have been told," he said. 

"I am angry," said Alan Williams, the former Hurricane Creek shift 
supervisor. Reynolds knew in 1962 what fluoride can do to you. They cant 
say they didnt, because they had their own study. 



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Reynolds had a very good idea about fluoride in 1962 based on the 
testimony I heard here today, said Tommy Ward, a rangy ex-worker who 
had been in court for most of the trial, watching the jury and listening to the 
medical experts. Ward had suffered a violent stroke in 1996. He blamed his 
health problems on his years at Hurricane Creek breathing fluoride potliner. 
Mullenix did a superb job, he said. The jury got enough of that, I could 
tell. I think the plaintiffs hit a home run today." 

Any optimism, however, vanished just four days later. In a decision that 
left many of the former workers incredulous and angry, Bruce McMath 
suddenly abandoned the lawsuit against Reynolds. On the Wednesday 
afternoon of October 25, 2000, Jerry Jones and Alan Wil liams went to 
court as usual. Nobody was around, Jones said. 

The trial had been scheduled to end that Friday. Several former 
workers were hopeful about the outcome. (McMath had seemed con- 
fident too, and had even turned down a modest offer from Reynolds to 
settle the case.) The jurors often passed through a landscaped area 
outside the courthouse, where smokers and visitors congregated and 
chatted. Diana Peebles had overheard a juror, she said. We just have to 
do something, the juror said, according to Peebles. They were saying 
it was just a question of how much they give us, Peebles explained she 
had overheard. 

However, that Wednesday morning, Bruce McMath had told Judge 
Phillips that he wanted to abandon the trial, in a legal procedure in 
Arkansas state courts known as non-suiting. McMath believed the jury 
had turned against him. He feared that the court would rule that the 
workers had not been injured at the site. It was better, he thought, to 
withdraw the lawsuit and perhaps allow another legal team to remount 
it at a later date. We were going to lose the whole case," he insisted. 
McMath blamed Judge Phil-lips for not allowing him to tell the jury 
that Reynolds Metals had suppressed the Kettering study. And he 
pointed the finger at state and federal agencies that had let Reynolds 
bury hundreds of tons of toxic fluoride waste at the Hurricane Creeks 
site. Reynolds had deceived those agencies, McMath said, by 
exaggerating how much fluoride its treatment process would remove. 
But the agencies had backed down, denying that they had been misled, 
effectively torpedoing his case. 



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The EPA basically said in as many words that they did not think they 
had been deceived or they had acted inappropriately, McMath explained. 
Of course they had. To a lawyer or to a sophisticated audience you could 
see what they had done, but they whitewashed it, and that really took the 
wind out of our sails in terms of the possibility of punitive damages or 
indignation with the jury. It became pretty evident to us that we were not 
going to be successful. 

But the Hurricane Creek workers were angry and baffled at the trial's 
outcome. It seemed bizarre. How could their lawyer first turn down a 
settlement from Reynolds and then abandon the entire lawsuit? Bruce 
McMath must have lost a fortune by aborting the Ben-ton lawsuit, said a 
Little Rock trial attorney, James Swindoll. "You are giving up two hundred 
grand the minute you do that," he said. " You can't get it back, unless you 
pursue it a second time." 13 

"We weren't very impressed," said the soft-spoken Diana Peebles. 
It just seems very strange to us that this would occur. Several other former 
workers felt that they had been deceived twice, first by Reynolds Metals 
and now by their lawyers. After the trial McMath had told Jerry Jones that 
he was going to reload for a second shot at Reynolds and bring a fresh 
lawsuit against the aluminum company, Jones said. Instead, eleven days 
later, on November 5, 2000, McMath and his partner, Steve Napper, 
gathered the workers together for an announcement. 

Jerry Jones remembers that day. He had not seen many of his former 
workmates in years. He was shocked at how their health had deteriorated. 
Some had developed crooked joints and "big knobs on their knees and 
fingers," said Jones. Skin sores were visible on many. Others could not lift 
their arms above their heads. "It was just ugly," said Jones. "It just blew my 
mind how it is slowly affecting them. You know there is something wrong 
when they all have the same thing," he added. 

The men listened as their lawyers addressed them for the final time. 
"Boys, we got some bad news," Jerry Jones remembers Steve Napper 
saying. After three years of representing them, McMath and Napper 
explained to the gathered men that they were dropping their case. It was too 
difficult to prove the Hurricane Creek workers had been permanently hurt 
by their chemical exposures, the lawyers explained. "Find someone else," 
McMath and Napper 



HURRICANE CREEK 215 



told the stunned workers, then shook a few hands and sidled out according 
to the shell-shocked Jerry Jones. The whole meeting didn't last five 
minutes," he recalled. 

But Bruce McMath is unapologetic for dropping the Hurricane Creek 
suit. There was little hard data on how much fluoride the men and women 
had been exposed to, he said. And proving that the chemical had caused so 
many different injuries, especially in the small sample of workers 
represented in the Benton case was difficult, he added. Many of the 
workers also smoked cigarettes. One abused cocaine. "It creates credibility 
problems," said McMath. "We were looking at a case with thin causation 
and amorphous damages, so it becomes an impossible proposition." 

The fate of the Benton trial was a consequence, perhaps, of fluoride's 
basic nature. Although fluoride's effects on human health potentially rival 
or even exceed the injuries caused by any other workplace poison, 
paradoxically, because fluoride has the potential to cause so many kinds of 
health problems, it is actually harder to fix blame on the chemical. Unlike 
other chemicals with easy-to-see and unique "signature" effects — such as 
the mesothelioma cancer caused by asbestos — fluoride is a systemic 
poison, inflicting differ ent injuries in different people and at different 
times. 

Duking it out with Reynolds Metals also gave Bruce McMath a 
first-hand look at how water fluoridation has aided industry in the 
courtroom. Hurricane Creek had been his first fluoride case. Proving 
fluoride injury to a jury was hard enough; but the federal government's 
long-ago endorsement of the safety of adding fluoride to public water 
supplies had placed the entire public-health establishment in fluoride's 
corner, he said. By waving a toothpaste tube at the Benton jury, Reynolds s 
Hurricane Creek attorney was taking advantage of that," McMath pointed 
out. " Industry has manipulated this public debate to put a smiling face on 
what is otherwise a toxin, and thereby reduce their cost of doing business in 
those businesses where fluoride is a waste product," he added. Dumping 
waste fluoride in reservoirs may help industry, but from a pure public 
health perspective, McMath said, This whole thing about putting it in the 
water is just silly. 

After the aborted lawsuit, Jerry Jones and Alan Williams hunted for a 
new attorney. They met with James Swindoll, who called 



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McMath s office and received an explanation that McMath had no intention 
of refiling the workers case. He remembers the Hurricane Creek workers 
who visited his office as some of the most well-informed clients that I ever 
interviewed. Swindoll declined to represent them, however, and they 
never found a lawyer willing to refile their claim. "It just looked like a 
nightmare of a case," he said. "It was going to bankrupt a plaintiffs 
lawyer." 

But because fluoride poisoning isn't easy to prove in a court of law, 
does it mean that doctors or regulators should abandon the issue? Phyllis 
Mullenix, for example, continues to take new cases of alleged fluoride 
poisoning in workers, representing plaintiffs around the country. She is 
convinced that an epidemic of disease and injury has slipped beneath the 
radar screen of modern health professionals. It is a sometimes -lonely battle, 
but the Plains daughter of Olive and Shockey Mullenix cannot walk away 
from the issue. She remains especially haunted by the anguished phone 
calls in the middle of the night from crippled former aluminum and 
chemical workers. They are often suffering obvious 
central-nervous-system problems, she notes, but they have been cast adrift 
by today s medical profession. I get some of the most pathetic individuals 
calling up, Mul-lenix says. "They can't get a doctor to listen. The doctors 
don't know anything about fluoride and think the workers are nuts." 



The Damage Is Done