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