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 https://www.blogger.com/null 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 HURRICANE CREEK 203
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 204 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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.
HURRICANE CREEK 205 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 206
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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. HURRICANE
CREEK 207 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." 208
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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? HURRICANE
CREEK 209 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. 210 CHAPTER SIXTEEN "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? 212 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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. HURRICANE CREEK 213
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. 214 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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
216 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 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 
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