Fluoridation: A Horror Story

This essay's first drafts, written in 1998, began with a several page chemistry narrative that presented some chemistry concepts. The original chemistry prelude was designed to help the reader understand the nature of fluoride, why it is used in industry how it is, why it is a waste product of certain industrial processes, and lays the groundwork for understanding why it was so important in the nuclear industry. Early readers felt that it was too much technical information for the lay audience, particularly to begin their reading experience. That prelude is now an addendum to this essay. Reading the prelude is not imperative for understanding this essay, but might make some issues clearer.

In short, fluorine is the most reactive element known to science ("reactive" means its affinity to bonding with other elements).[1] In nature, fluorine is found bonded to other elements, never found by itself, and is rarely found in its ionic state. The industrial processes of the 19^th century created the most toxic pollutants that humanity had seen to that time. Taking ore from the earth and removing the metal, especially in aluminum refining, created hazardous waste.

In its ionic state, fluorine is highly toxic. Fluorine bonded to metallic ore in the earth was liberated during the refining process and is difficult-to-impossible to safely dispose. The aluminum refining industry was the biggest and most influential fluoride polluter around 1930, and in America only one company was in the aluminum business: ALCOA.

Fluorine is also useful for producing artificial chemicals such as Teflon and Freon, because of its unique properties. Those unique properties also made fluorine indispensable for refining uranium to extract its most radioactive isotope, which made the nuclear age possible.

The increasing industrialization of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries saw an explosion in aluminum use. Aluminum is a ubiquitous substance in industrialized societies. It is everywhere, from electrical wiring to food and beverage cans to cookware to automobiles to airplanes. As the Industrial Revolution was hitting its stride in the early 20^th century, aluminum refiners had a major problem with the fluorides attending aluminum production: they are deadly poisons. Fluorine once safely bound with aluminum, copper, and iron in Earth’s crust was reintroduced into the environment in its ionic state. Fluorides were not only being buried in the ground and put into the water, they were also being released into the air by industrial processes. Fluoride pollution was a major industrial problem.

Because it holds its electrons more tightly than any other element, fluorine forms the smallest negatively charged ion of any element, and that small size allows fluorine ions to go where larger ions of other elements cannot. Also, when introduced to the stomach, more than a third of ingested fluoride is converted to hydrofluoric acid, which is highly toxic.[2] In the early 21^st century, it became increasingly evident that even at low doses, such as around the level that artificial fluoridation provides, the fluorine ion damages cellular structures and mechanisms, from respiration to metabolism to gene expression to enzyme functioning.[3] Perhaps most importantly, sufficient cellular damage initiates programmed cell death, known as apoptosis. Below is a diagram from a 2010 scientific paper on fluoride’s impact on cellular processes:[4]

In his Fluoride and the Aging Factor, which was one of the early challenges to fluoridation, published in 1983, John Yiamouyiannis wrote that the fluorine ion disrupts hydrogen bonds.[5] Those fluorine ions can disrupt hydrogen bonds in numerous enzymes and DNA (the hydrogen is attracted to the fluorine ion more than to the original atom that the hydrogen formed its hydrogen bond with), which wrecks the molecules. In biology labs today, fluorine ions are a preferred way to poison enzymes, as they break the "lock" that the "key" will fit into. That is one way how the fluorine ion can harm or kill people, and it can lead to genetic damage when it attack's DNA's hydrogen bonds. The fluorine ion acts similarly to “free radicals” in the body as it attacks and wrecks molecules.

In the 21^st century, the connections between programmed cell death and aging are being discovered in ways that Yiamouyiannis did not write about, but his writings on the connection between fluoride and aging are being validated. Below is a diagram of energy production in a healthy complex cell (a eukaryotic cell):

In the 1990s, the mechanism of cell death was discovered, and a diagram of it is below.[6]

Nick Lane researches cellular processes and tackles big questions such as the origin of life on Earth. One subject of his study has been the relationship of free radical production, programmed cell death, and aging. His primary example is the differing life spans of pigeons and rats. Pigeons have about the same body mass as rats but produce one-tenth of a rat’s free radicals and live ten times as long. Lane’s hypothesis states that when specialized cells such as neurons and muscles die, they are not replaced, which means that fewer cells do the biological job, which adds stress to the surviving cells. Also, cells that are easily replaced by stem cells can develop mitochondrial mutations that can lead to cells with damaged growth regulation, which can lead to degenerative diseases such as cancer.[7] Below is a diagram of Lane’s hypothesis of why pigeons live ten times longer than rats.

The increasing evidence of fluoride-caused apoptosis, and its related aging, may bring posthumous vindication to Yiamouyiannis, although the American medical establishment is notorious for stealing from suppressed pioneers and never acknowledging their contributions.

Another common industrial element, chlorine, which is in fluorine's chemical family, behaves similarly, and the chlorine issue is another one where chlorine is undoubtedly carcinogenic, among other health hazards, but industrial propaganda and criminal activity prevents meaningful chlorine regulation.[8] Chlorine is the other element compulsorily added to the water supply, to kill microorganisms.

No scientist will dispute the idea that fluorides are deadly poisons, as it is universally accepted. Among the hazards of fluoride are dental fluorosis, skeletal fluorosis, sterility, birth defects, cancer, and brain damage.

Dental fluorosis progresses with increased fluorine ion concentration as follows. First, the teeth develop a mottled look. Flecks can be seen on the enamel. Tooth mottling can begin at less than one part per million ("PPM"), which is the concentration added to the water supply in communities that fluoridate their water. As the concentration rises to two PPM, the teeth discolor and gradually turn brown. Accompanying this process, the teeth become hard and brittle, and then begin chipping and disintegrating. Although the mechanism of fluorine destruction and "protection" of teeth has been obscure during the era of fluoridation, recent research has shown that the fluorine ion inhibits the enzyme that forms enamel, which causes malformed enamel. Somehow, malformed enamel protects teeth, at least in the eyes of fluoridation's proponents. In Frank McClure’s Water Fluoridation, The Search and the Victory, there is a color photo section showing the progress of dental fluorosis. In advanced cases, the teeth are reduced to blackened stumps (images of this process are easily available on the Internet). In skeletal fluorosis, the skeleton disintegrates.

In 1916, G.V. Black and F.S. McKay presented the first study of tooth mottling. Tooth mottling was common in children in Colorado, Texas, and other western states, and an effort was launched to determine its cause. In Colorado the condition was known as “Colorado Brown Stain,” and in Texas it was “Texas Teeth.” In 1931, three independent studies concluded that tooth mottling was caused by fluorine ions in the water supply, and it has been generally accepted ever since.[9] Usually, the fluorine ions were naturally occurring.

Because humans are the only animals to drill wells, we are often exposed to water that has a high natural fluorine ion content, generally in areas where there is little rainfall and the groundwater's dissolved mineral content is naturally high, and also in areas of volcanism. There are places where well water has high fluoride content and people die at an early age from fluoride poisoning and have other fluoride-related ailments. In Fluoride and the Aging Factor, John Yiamouyiannis devoted chapters of his book to presenting cases where that happened. McClure’s Water Fluoridation, The Search and the Victory and Waldbott’s Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma extensively documented the hazards of environmental fluorides.

By the turn of the 20^th century, industrially created airborne and waterborne fluorides were becoming a major health hazard. In 1901, one study found that fluorides “are much more toxic than the other compounds that are of significance in the industrial smoke problem.”[10] As early as 1850, people and livestock were being poisoned by fluoride emissions from the iron and copper industries.[11] In 1930, the world’s first major air pollution disaster happened in Belgium’s Meuse Valley, where thousands of people became violently ill and 60 people died. The world’s foremost authority on the issue, Kaj Roholm, concluded that airborne fluorides were responsible.[12] The fertilizer industry was mainly responsible in that instance. As late as 1970, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stated that airborne fluorides “caused more worldwide damage to domestic animals than any other air pollutant.”[13]

In the USA, with its industrialized economy, there was only one aluminum company in the 1930s, in the standard monopoly situation. The Aluminum Company of America, ALCOA, was probably the world's biggest fluoride polluter at the time.

On the heels of the discovery that fluoride caused tooth mottling, Public Health Service ("PHS") scientist Trendley Dean, the first director of the National Institute of Dental Research, was sent west. As Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon had authority over the PHS, and Mellon financed and was the controlling shareholder of ALCOA. Dean's mission was to research communities in which naturally occurring fluoride was high in the water supply, to see how much fluoride children’s teeth could absorb before disintegrating. There was an obvious conflict of interest in Dean’s research. Dean announced his results and made the statement that fluoride in the water supply decreased tooth decay in children. Below is some of Dean's pertinent data.[14]

The only unmistakable trend is the one showing dental fluorosis increasing with fluoride concentration, which was expressly what Dean went west to determine. Black and McKay noted that mottled teeth did not seem to have a higher incidence of tooth decay, and Dean extended those findings, although that was not his job. A man was specifically assigned to investigate the damage that a particular chemical did to teeth, but somehow concluded that the chemical was instead good for teeth. To paraphrase Dean’s findings: “As children’s teeth disintegrate, they may have fewer cavities.” Dean is known today as the “father of fluoridation.” It has now been admitted by virtually everybody involved with the fluoridation issue, even by Dean himself (given under oath on a witness stand), that his early data provided no evidence that increasing fluoride concentration in the water supply reduced tooth decay.

Dean later became one of fluoridation’s propagandists, but was initially cautious with his suggestion. Dean’s questionable suggestion regarding the potential dental benefits of fluoride was all that ALCOA-related scientist Gerald Cox (he worked for the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh) needed to begin proposing that the nation’s water supplies be fluoridated. In 1937 Cox announced, “It is possible that fluorine is specifically required for the formation of teeth.”[15] Cox was the first to suggest the compulsory fluoridation of entire communities. Ironically, the PHS spent the ten years after 1931 trying to eliminate fluorine ions from the water supply, given the tooth mottling findings. Cox partly based his fluoridation suggestion on the work of Gerald Armstrong, who in 1938 published findings that decayed teeth seemed to have lower fluorine content than healthy teeth. In 1963, Armstrong published a reinvestigation of his 1938 findings, and concluded that his earlier findings were wrong, and that there was no detectable difference in the fluoride content of healthy and decayed teeth.[16] In summary, the discovering scientists themselves admitted that the two major scientific findings of the 1930s that showed that fluoride might be good for the teeth, and were the basis of later campaigns to compulsorily fluoridate water supplies, were worthless.

Naturally occurring fluoride in the water supply is usually composed of fluorine and calcium atoms. What component of dissolved calcium fluoride might have a positive effect on bones and teeth? The calcium aspect was ignored, while the fluorine component was obsessively pursued. The fluoride compounds artificially added to the water supply are sodium fluoride and fluosilicic acid, which are industrial waste byproducts. By the 1950s, the National Institute of Dental Research ("NIDR") produced “research” that fluoride polluters used to protect themselves from liability lawsuits.[17] It was not much different from the AMA-guided "research" between from the 1930s to the 1950s that was used to make health claims for cigarettes.

If the data supporting fluoridation is analyzed, it quickly becomes evident that all the pro-fluoridation people have in their favor are highly uncertain statistics. The theories are conflicting, as is the data.[18] Although fluorine is found in bones and teeth, so are other elements that nobody says are essential for health (and even toxic), and more than 80% of fluorine given to humans and animals in experiments is immediately excreted.[19] The same mechanisms that supposedly protect teeth also cause tooth mottling. It is quite the double-edged sword. Even giving the pro-fluoridation forces the benefit of the doubt regarding their statistics, their data on the benefit of fluoride amounts to one tooth per mouth, which is not very exciting.[20] It is an alarmingly small benefit when the undeniable harm caused by fluoride is considered. Benjamin Disraeli said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Pro-fluoridation data is a classic case of statistical gamesmanship. Even if the motivation of most pro-fluoridation researchers were not suspect, their empirical and statistical methods are. Many criticisms have been leveled at the methods of fluoridation researchers regarding uncontrolled variables, omission of pertinent data, mathematical errors, and outright bogus science.[21]

Among the giants of the early days of fluoridation research were Trendley Dean, Gerald Cox, Frank McClure, Harold Hodge, Edward Largent, Wallace Armstrong, and David Ast. Dean's and Cox's relationships to ALCOA were evident, and Largent was the most visible member of the research teams at Kettering Laboratories at the University of Cincinnati, funded by ALCOA and several other fluoride-polluting companies. Largent was a consultant for Reynolds Aluminum. McClure was one of fluoridation’s greatest cheerleaders, who worked for the industry-influenced NIDR. Armstrong was a comrade-in-arms with Dean and McClure, promoting fluoridation. Hodge had a sinister relationship to the fluoridation issue, discovered through declassified U.S. documents, which also tainted Ast.

Dean was not the first person to suggest that fluoride might be good for teeth. It was suggested as early as 1892, as it was detected in bones and teeth, although experiments in the 1920s disproved the notion.[22] It had not yet been established that fluoride caused “tooth mottling,” but already scientists were trying to see if fluoride might be good for teeth. There were health disasters happening throughout the industrialized world due to fluoride, but a handful of ALCOA-influenced/funded scientists pursued how fluoride might be good for health. They and their corporate sponsors eventually prevailed, as money speaks loudly in America, and corporations are considered people with "free speech" rights.

Although the industrial scientists’ well-paid efforts were important, it was up to a lawyer to literally ram fluoridation down the American public’s throat. In 1947, ALCOA’s lead counsel, Oscar Ewing, was named to head the Federal Security Agency ("FSA"), which later became the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department (today it is called the Department of Health and Human Services, or "HHS"). Ewing went on the ALCOA payroll in 1944 at a salary of $750,000 per year, which was astronomical for the time. The FSA oversaw the PHS, and the same year that Ewing began at the FSA, he initiated a national fluoridation project through the PHS, which helped to build a bandwagon for fluoridation in the absence of any credible scientific data. At that time, two cities were undergoing water-supply fluoridation tests: Grand Rapids, Michigan and Newburgh, New York. The tests were to run for 10 to 15 years to collect data. Ewing began campaigning for a national fluoridation program when those tests were only two years old, and no significant data was available or even possible. None other than Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations” and one of the greatest propagandists of all time, designed Ewing’s public relations campaign for fluoridation. Bernays also designed the campaign by the American Tobacco Company to addict American women to tobacco, and Joseph Goebbels used Bernays’s work in his Nazi propaganda campaigns against the Jews.[23]

By 1950, 89 cities were fluoridated, despite no credible evidence ever submitted that demonstrated that it reduced tooth decay, or did anything other than cause disease, misery, and death. By 1950, ALCOA was in a new line of business: selling sodium fluoride to cities to put into their water supply. ALCOA was advertising the blessed purity of its sodium fluoride. Reality had been inverted, and a deadly industrial waste was forced down the American public’s throat as “medicine.” That reality remains inverted to this day. Eventually, the fluoridation results for Newburgh and Grand Rapids were partially published and largely have been ignored ever since. Although there was no measurable decrease in tooth decay, Newburgh boys had twice the incidence of skeletal deformities and a higher tooth-mottling rate as compared to the unfluoridated control group in nearby Kingston. Seeing how Newburgh fared, Kingston has successfully resisted having its water supply fluoridated ever since. Other Newburgh data was noteworthy, although largely suppressed: Newburgh developed one of the highest heart disease rates in the USA, and girls came to puberty earlier than the control group. The heart disease rate in Grand Rapids doubled after the first five years of the fluoridation experiment.[24]

Such an anti-scientific rush gathers momentum, similar to a stampeding herd. The PHS and other bureaucracies would never back down from their position, no matter what. Fluoridation’s proponents have even admitted that.[25] It has taken several centuries for the Catholic Church to admit that the Inquisition was probably not such a great institution. The Index of banned books was not discontinued until the 1960s, and the Holy Office was merely renamed “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” and it acts as a more genteel version of the heretic-burning office it once was, but its goal is the same: defending the Church's power.[26] The cost of admitting that one was wrong, especially on something so potentially damning as adding a poison to the water supply, is too high for most people and virtually all bureaucrats to contemplate. The rash and possibly dishonest decisions made before I was born will be enforced as long as there is the power to do so.

There was plenty of public uproar over fluoridation in the 1950s, but money not only talks in America, it dictates. Today, the average American has no familiarity with fluoridation's history or the fact that there still is no credible data that demonstrates that fluoridation reduces tooth decay, and overwhelming, indisputable evidence that fluoride is a deadly poison. The logic is that fluoride is good for the teeth at one PPM, but begins causing health problems at concentrations of less than two PPM. Harold Hodge, one of fluoridation's pioneers and a toxicology expert, whose epidemiological research was influential in making fluoridation appear benign, himself stated that there should be at least a 100-fold margin in the dietary use of a potentially toxic agent.[27] The PHS adopted a two-to-one margin, although plenty of credible evidence shows that fluoride at one PPM (what most Americans drink) contributes many health ailments, including cancer.

Reading the books for and against fluoridation can be illuminating. Two books that highlight the conflict are Water Fluoridation, The Search and the Victory, by Frank McClure, and Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, by George Waldbott and two other scientists. McClure devoted the first quarter of his book to outlining some of fluoride's health hazards, including dental and skeletal fluorosis. If people read his book only to page 74, they might think that fluoride would be one of the modern world's greatest health hazards. However, the first words on page 75 are:

“By 1930 the time had arrived when epidemiological research was on the verge of demonstrating with unequivocal certainty the alliance between dental caries prevention and an optimum quantity of fluoride in public drinking waters.”

The rest of the book is a paean to the virtues of compulsory fluoridation. The book was published in 1970. What made McClure’s statement bizarre was that it was not until 1931 that fluoride was considered the cause of tooth mottling. Before the dangers of fluoride to teeth were discovered, there was almost “unequivocal certainty” that fluoride was good for teeth.

With his statement of “certainty” about fluoride's benefits, McClure’s book was silent regarding some truly unequivocal issues of tooth decay. One unequivocal issue is that the civilized diet is almost solely responsible for tooth decay. Fossil evidence demonstrates that tooth decay began when civilization did, with Sumerians being one early example of significant tooth decay. In ancient Egypt, the upper classes had significant tooth decay, while the lower classes, eating simpler food, had very little.[28] In Silesia, located in present-day Europe (Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia), tooth decay was found in 1.75% of the population at the end of the Stone Age, versus 80% (up to 95% in some populations) in recent years.[29]

There is dramatic evidence regarding the civilized diet's pernicious influence on teeth, and especially refined sugar. Wherever Western civilization has made its appearance over the past several centuries, tooth decay and other health problems have followed in its wake. In the 1930s, Weston Price journeyed to Earth’s last remaining “primitive” civilizations. Price studied primitive civilizations and what happened to them when introduced to the “civilized” diet. On average, the “primitive” peoples exposed to civilized diets experienced a 3,500% (35 times) increase in tooth decay, of the 14 cultures he studied. Their dental arches also degenerated, which led to crowded teeth.[30] Western dentistry and orthodontics owe nearly their entire existence to processed food.

In keeping with the time-honored, male-dominated, capitalistic style of Western medicine, true prevention is not a concept. Instead of McClure advocating eliminating sugar and processed food from the diet to prevent tooth decay, a highly toxic waste byproduct of the aluminum processing and fertilizer industries, among others, becomes a miracle substance, compulsorily added to the water supply to “prevent” tooth decay. McClure and friends not only kept the food processors in business, but they also helped create a new market for toxic waste.

That was not the only blind spot in McClure’s work. The possible economic incentive of the fluoride polluters, and those they funded, was largely invisible. In light of recently declassified documents, and the now known corporate affiliations of McClure’s pantheon of fluoridation’s pioneers, McClure’s work today resembles a primer on the corruption of science.

The final chapter of Water Fluoridation, The Search and the Victory, dealt with the opposition to fluoridation and how the pro-fluoridation forces triumphed. Particularly enlightening is McClure’s summary of a great fluoridation victory: the compulsory fluoridation of Ireland. McClure reprinted part of the judgment rendered by Justice Kenny. Kenny rejected the testimony of Waldbott and three other expert witnesses. The judge accepted wholly the testimony of Hodge, Yngve Ericsson, Armstrong, and others. Armstrong would soon publicly admit the worthlessness of his early research. Ericsson, from Sweden, was one of Europe’s biggest fluoridation proponents. Ericsson received money from the PHS and even received royalties from Sweden’s toothpaste industry on fluoridation patents that he held.[31] Justice Kenny gave his reasons for rejecting Waldbott’s and the others' testimony. He said that their views were fanatical, “passionate” and not supported by credible science. Kenny concluded that Hodge, Armstrong, Ericsson, and the others from the fluoridation establishment were models of objectivity and learned reason, with the weight of science behind them. Knowing the now public but then secret bias of Hodge, the payola of Ericsson, and all their affiliations to the PHS, which was dominated by ALCOA for many years, the judge’s comments make for astonishing reading.

The scientific aspects surrounding the issue render water-fluoridation research highly suspect, if nothing else. The standard unit of tooth decay, known as DMF (decayed, missing, and filled), used by all fluoridation researchers, is far from sturdy. In chapter 12 of Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, the authors poked many and gaping holes in the research that supposedly supports compulsory fluoridation. One study showed that there was up to an 89% variation in cavities reported in a mouth, depending on which dentist performed the examination.[32] In the case of pro-fluoridation research, as with many others in the annals of science, it appears that the error rate may have been larger than the effect being studied, which made the research worthless.

There is a mountain of contradictory data to the “unequivocal,” undebatable data that McClure lauded.[33] In reviewing data, it was interesting that just as death rates went down in the Western nations during World War II (and WW I, due to natural causes) as they were reduced to being vegetarians and growing their own food, their dental health also improved. Their general and dental health also unraveled after the war years, as they went back to their normal diets and abandoned their Victory Gardens.[34] It is odd that in America’s trial fluoridation experiments, the data at times showed an alarming increase in tooth decay after the war years, even though they were the new beneficiaries of artificial fluoridation. Even if it is accepted that fluoridation fights tooth decay, there are many results that show that “safely” fluoridated water still causes dental fluorosis. In Massachusetts, a 1974 study showed a 63% incidence of dental fluorosis in children in a fluoridated community.[35] In India, a study showed that 81% of the children had dental fluorosis with water at 0.73 PPM fluoride, which is less than that artificially added to fluoridated water supplies.[36]

There are many cases of people having toxic reactions to fluoridated water and even dying, but the fluoridation establishment has covered it up by intimidation and marginalization of scientists who speak out, including getting them fired, such as in John Yiamouyiannis's case.[37] Doctors and dentists who spoke out against fluoridation risked losing their licenses and other unpleasant fates. Smear campaigns, book-bannings, secret police tactics, official censure, and a wide assortment of bedevilments awaited any doctor, dentist, or scientist who spoke out against fluoridation, not to mention an ever-shrinking funding pool for studying fluoride’s harmful effects. In the 1950’s, about half of all American dentists did not believe in fluoridation, but dared not speak out.[38] If they did, a McCarthy-like witch-hunt could be visited upon them.

There was controversy in the early days as Ewing and friends were campaigning to get water fluoridated. Below is one of the few brave statements by a medical doctor in standing up to the propaganda barrage, made in 1952 by a U.S. Congressman.

“Mr. Speaker, despite my best efforts, and from the evidence before my committee, I cannot find any public evidence that gave me the impression that the AMA, the Dental Association [ADA - Ed.], or several other health agencies, now recommending the fluoridation of water, had done any original work of their own. These groups were simply endorsing each other's opinions.

"You will note that all of the experts grounded in the science of bio-chemistry have advocated the go-slow sign on the use of fluorides in drinking water. I believe that the dental profession and other public-minded individuals. like myself, have been misled by the PHS, because all of the facts have not been made available upon this subject."

"…I sometimes wonder if the Aluminum Company of America and its many subsidiary companies might not have a deep interest in getting rid of the waste products from the manufacture of aluminum, because these products contain a large amount of fluoride. In this connection it is interesting to know that Oscar Ewing, who now heads up the Federal Security Administration, and the firm of attorneys he was with - Hubbard, Hill and Ewing - represents the Aluminum Company of America."[39]

In the fluoridation issue, the same conflicts of interest and corruption that pervade organized medicine are clearly seen. The AMA has never has had much to do with promoting the public’s wellbeing, and instead promoted cigarettes and helped cover up health disasters. That dynamic can also be found in the American Dental Association ("ADA"); its financial relationship with candy companies is similar to the relationship that the AMA had for generations with the tobacco interests. In 1995, the ADA received 15% of its money from trade groups such as the Sugar Association, Coca-Cola, and M & M. The ADA actively promotes compulsory fluoridation. The ADA was also guilty of stating that the ACLU endorsed fluoridation when it in fact did not.[40] Since 1993, the ADA had to drop many organizations from its list of fluoridation supporters, including the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA").[41]

In David Kennedy’s How to Save Your Teeth he devoted a chapter to the fluoride issue. Kennedy and his father were dentists. Kennedy grew up believing the fluoridation propaganda. His eyes were opened when he read of a three-year-old child dying from a fluoride treatment in 1974. A typical dentist’s treatment is to apply topical stannous (tin) fluoride gel to the child’s teeth, then have the child drink water, swish it around in his/her mouth, then spit it out. That is similar to the “swish” fluoride program that was popular in fluoridation’s early days.

The three-year-old boy, on his first trip to the dentist, was handed the water by the dental hygienist, who did not tell him what to do. The child swallowed the water. The fluoride gel on his teeth went into his stomach and was three times the dose necessary to kill him. The child immediately began vomiting and complaining of dizziness and headaches. The dentist downplayed the child’s reaction and said that his fluoride treatment was normal. The mother was not comforted by the dentist’s assurances and was sent to a pediatric care unit in the same building. The care unit ignored the mother’s frantic pleas to attend to her son. For more than two hours she waited for somebody to attend to her son as he lapsed into a coma. When the medical staff finally got around to seeing the son, they injected adrenaline into his heart and he was rushed to a hospital, where they waited for another hour. The boy again lapsed into a coma, then the doctors attempted to pump his stomach and he died of cardiac arrest. The boy's parents were eventually awarded $750,000.[42]

The only mistake was the boy swallowing the water instead of spitting it out. Dental industry apologists have said that the procedure was not quite orthodox, and that the boy was told to spit out the water.[43] What a defense. Kennedy began looking into fluoridation, found no credible data supporting fluoridation, and became one of fluoridation's leading opponents.

Something really happens to teeth when exposed to fluoridation. Artificial fluoridation at one PPM appears to induce the early stages of dental fluorosis. Fluoridation's proponents tout the effect of hardening the enamel. That hardening appears to take place. What does that hardening represent? As the evidence is showing, it is the malformation of the enamel, which hardens and embrittles them, similar to an effect seen in metallurgy, where metals can be both hardened and embrittled. The hardening is only the first stage of fluorosis. The next stage is that the brittle teeth begin mottling, chipping, and disintegrating. The process does not prevent cavities from forming, and makes cavities more catastrophic to the teeth than they would otherwise be.

For argument’s sake, I will accept that fluoridation is indeed a boon to the teeth, and cavities decrease when fluorine is introduced to the body, and that there is a health benefit to ingesting fluorine, although fluoridation's proponents say that those benefits primarily apply to children. Let me be even more optimistic and say that everybody benefits from fluorine. Let me be the greatest believer in fluoride's benefits and state that every tooth benefits from fluoride. Even if I was fluoride's biggest cheerleader, I still have to admit that dental and skeletal fluorosis exist. People's teeth and skeletons disintegrate when exposed to too much fluoride, denied by nobody. The other documented health hazards I will ignore for the moment as unsubstantiated.

Numerous studies show that dental fluorosis occurs in people exposed to only one PPM fluoride in the water supply. Yet, let me call fluoride a medicine. Let me consider fluoride similar to penicillin, as far as how universally wonderful it is for us. Some people should not take penicillin because they have adverse reactions. Similarly, some people are far more sensitive to fluoride and have reactions to it at levels that most endure with no obvious harm. Millions of Americans today have that problem. That situation is typical of most drugs. How can I measure how much fluoride is in the rest of my ingestion, such as from my food, my toothpaste, and my dentist's fluoride treatments? If I were a doctor, prescribing penicillin to my patients (similar to a dentist and fluoride treatments), how would I feel if they also had penicillin in their food, water, and toothpaste? Could I effectively control their overall dose of penicillin? There is not a sane doctor alive who would prescribe a medicine to the entire population, and in such a way that he/she could not tailor the dose for each patient. Nevertheless, that is what compulsory fluoridation does.

Using even better logic than fluoridation's proponents, people theoretically cannot overdose on vitamin C. Why not compulsorily add vitamin C to America’s water supply? It could only help our health, could it not? One problem is there is no cheap source of vitamin C, whereas fluoride has the marvelous distinction of being a toxic waste byproduct of several industries. Today, the fertilizer industry has beaten out the aluminum refining industry as the source of fluoride in America’s water supplies, as they provided the fluoride ion more cheaply. In the 1990s, 90% of fluoride added to America’s water was in the form of fluosilicic acid, mainly provided by the phosphate fertilizer industry. In 1983, Rebecca Hammer of the EPA endorsed adding fluosilicic acid to the water supply, because it killed two birds with one stone. In Hammer's words:

"In regard to the use of fluosilicic acid as a source of fluorides for fluoridation, this Agency regards such as an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them."

Instead of having to undertake costly measures to dispose of the hazardous waste, adding it to the water supply reduced both the costs of hazardous waste disposal and our dental bills. If only all industrial waste problems could find themselves in such a win-win situation.

In the early 21^st century, well more than half of American children had dental fluorosis, to some degree, the rate is greater than 80% in some fluoridated areas, and has been steadily increasing. Millions of Americans have already had their teeth ruined by dental fluorosis, which led to dental work, up to and including dentures. Fluoridation promoters have continually minimized dental fluorosis as a mere cosmetic problem, but the facts are something else. When cancer patients have chemotherapy and their hair falls out, it is indicative of far more widespread tissue damage, and hair falling out is the least of it. Similarly, dental fluorosis is merely the visible evidence of systemic fluoride poisoning. Ironically, research (even mainstream research, by the NIDR) has shown that dental fluorosis increases tooth decay, and does not decrease it.[44]

Although reverse osmosis removes about 90% of the fluoride, and steam distillation removes well over 99%, people can still absorb it through their skin while in the shower and through other contact. I have consumed purified water since I was a teenager, avoiding not only fluorine but also chlorine and other pollutants. Actively putting fluoride into the water supply has helped create an industry that removes it.

The long-term effect of fluoridation is increasing a dentist's business. The teeth still get their cavities, but when a dentist attempts to repair a tooth that has been fluoridated, the tooth has disintegrated to the point where a simple filling will not suffice. The tooth begins coming apart as the dentist works on it. Instead, the tooth gets a crown or other more extensive repair. Dentists have remarked on that phenomenon for many years.

Investigating Harold Hodge’s career can be a surreal experience. He was the leading scientist who created the data showing fluoride's harmlessness in the doses they planned to administer to the nation’s water supplies. In the late 1990s, Joel Griffiths and Christopher Bryson unearthed documents regarding Hodge’s involvement in acts that are crimes against humanity. To better understand the situation, this essay will need to revisit chemistry, fluorine, and the atom bomb.

Du Pont invented Freon early in the 20^th century. During World War II and America’s secret pursuit of the atom bomb, there were many technical hurdles to overcome. A major problem was obtaining the necessary nuclear materials. In nature, uranium primarily exists in two isotopes. An isotope is a version of an element. What makes one an elemental isotope different from another is its number of neutrons. In nature, Uranium is found as Uranium 238 ("U-238") and U-235. U-238 is by far the most abundant isotope and comprises more than 99% of all uranium. U-235 makes up less than 1% of naturally occurring uranium, but it is the isotope needed to make a bomb. The difference between U-235 and U-238 is three neutrons. Those three fewer neutrons make U-235 less stable (undergoing radioactive decay into more stable elements) than U-238. U-235’s half-life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) is 700 million years, but that is short compared to U-238’s 4.5 billion years. It is short enough to lump it together and create a nuclear chain reaction. That chain reaction is the required event for making nuclear weapons and nuclear energy possible.

How to separate U-235 from U-238? The answer was simple and the key to making nuclear weapons. Du Pont was the acknowledged master of refrigeration, and using fluorine to make a refrigerant was their specialty. The secret to separating the uranium isotopes was turning uranium into a gas, and uranium hexafluoride was born, which is one uranium atom bonded to six fluorine atoms. It is the only known uranium compound that is a gas at near environmental temperatures (its boiling point is 134° F). It is called “Hex” in the industry. From this essay’s chemistry lesson addendum, it should be obvious why that compound had such a low boiling point. Hex is uranium gas, or one could call it radioactive Freon.

Here is how they separated it. The Hex of U-235 is slightly lighter than Hex of U-238, because of those three neutrons. What Manhattan Project personnel did was send Hex through a mile-long tunnel filled with screens. As the Hex made its way to the end of the tunnel, the Hex, U-235 rose in comparison to the Hex, U-238, because it was slightly lighter. A membrane then filtered it out. It was an ingenious solution. They accumulated U-235 an atom at a time. The work of tens of thousands of people was directed at getting a lump of U-235 that I could hold in my hand. That was the active ingredient in the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Du Pont produced vast amounts of fluorine for the Hex. During 1944 there was an accident at du Pont, and a cloud of deadly hydrogen fluoride was released into the air. When added to water, hydrogen fluoride becomes hydrofluoric acid. There were probably numerous releases.[45] The fluoride clouds sailed away to farms downwind. Crops withered, and people and animals became violently ill. The affected farmers in Gloucester and Salem counties, famous for their high quality produce, sued the federal government after the war. They were stifled in their lawsuits against du Pont and the Manhattan Project, largely because the data regarding the damage done was kept secret in the interest of “national security.” The farmers eventually gave up and settled their suits for a few hundred dollars per farm. Recently declassified documents show Harold Hodge’s active role in the government’s damage control effort. In a secret Manhattan Project memo dated March 1, 1946, Hodge, who was the Manhattan Project’s chief toxicologist for fluorine studies, wrote to the Manhattan Project's medical division chief, Colonel Stafford Warren. Hodge expressed his concern regarding the toxicity of fluorine and the New Jersey incident. Hodge outlined four major areas of concern:

"2. A report of extraordinary fluoride content of vegetables grown in this area.

"3. A report of abnormally high fluoride content in the blood of human individuals residing in this area.

"4. A report raising the question of serious poisoning of horses and cattle in this area."

Shortly after the farmers sued, the federal government mobilized tremendous resources to counteract the farmers' efforts. Secret meetings were held in Washington D.C., attended by everybody from the FDA to the Bureau of Standards to the Justice Department. Why were they meeting? In a declassified memo from Colonel Cooper Rhodes of the Manhattan Project, those government agencies were “making scientific investigations to obtain evidence which may be used to protect the interest of the Government at the trial of the suits brought by owners of peach orchards in ... New Jersey.” If the farmers prevailed in court, America’s entire nuclear program could have been threatened.

Hodge also wrote to his boss, "Would there be any use in making attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents of Salem and Gloucester counties through lectures on F toxicology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?" “F” stood for fluoride, and was the name of the top-secret program begun during those days to study the harmful effects of fluoride. “Project F” was performed at the University of Rochester, where Hodge worked. The University of Rochester is already infamous for other “research” it performed at the same time for the Manhattan Project: they secretly injected people with plutonium without their knowledge, in one of many guinea pig experiments performed on American citizens to test chemicals and radiation. Over a 30-year period, the USA's government administered everything from plutonium to LSD to unwitting “subjects.” Those are only the experiments that have been made public.[46]

Studying the decision-making process that led to dropping the atom bombs, the CIA’s hiring of Nazis, the USA's military shenanigans, and the activities of the USA's alphabet soup “security” organizations regularly elicits amazement at how much information is still being kept secret, even documents from World War II. A researcher discovering a newly declassified document can discover other classified documents. The first document seen can be revealing, but what can be more intriguing are other documents referred to by the original document. When the researcher tries finding the referred document, he/she can find it still classified.

Apologists for the secrecy, such as UFO debunker Phil Klass, state that there are legitimate national security reasons for keeping 100% of the information secret that the National Security Agency has on UFOs, for instance.[47] Ex-CIA agent Ralph McGehee, whose bitter experience makes it clear that the government nearly never has a legitimate “security” reason for keeping anything classified, refutes the assertions of establishment apologists. Secrecy and deception (lies of omission and commission) are the handmaidens of self-serving activities, as a cover for dark deeds or to keep the grip on power and wealth for a select few.

Griffiths and Bryson’s work regarding the 50-year-old (at the time) fluoridation research ran into the “national security” obstacle.[48] Hodge was involved with promoting fluoride before the New Jersey accident in 1944. In 1943, Hodge chaired the committee that decided the feasibility of fluoridating the water supply of Newburgh, New York, one of two American cities first targeted for artificial fluoridation. The committee was eventually composed of other Manhattan Project members, such as Henry Barnett and John Fertig. The Manhattan Project affiliations of Hodge, Barnett, and Fertig were kept secret. The wolves were looking after the interests of the sheep. Trendley Dean himself was opposed to the Newburgh test, fearing fluoride’s toxicity. Manhattan Project personnel, led by Hodge, covered up Dean’s opposition.[49] The man in charge of the Newburgh fluoridation project was David Ast, who was another fluoridation legend who attended the secret Manhattan Project meetings regarding the New Jersey accident, according to declassified documents.

The situation was so skewed that the Program F scientists published a 1948 paper that ran in the Journal of the American Dental Association, which described the health effects on humans. Griffiths and Bryson obtained the original report, now declassified, and found that the Atomic Energy Commission censored the harmful health effects that were documented. The censorship was so severe it was funny, in a sick way. Griffiths and Bryson wrote:

“This was a study of the dental and physical health of workers in a factory producing fluoride for the A-bomb program, conducted by a team of dentists from the Manhattan Project. The secret version reports that most of the men had no teeth left. The published version reports only that the men had fewer cavities. The secret version says the men had to wear rubber boots because the fluoride fumes disintegrated the nails in their shoes. The published version does not mention this. The secret version says the fluoride may have acted similarly on the men's teeth, contributing to their toothlessness. The published version omits this statement. The published version concludes that ‘the men were unusually healthy, judged from both a medical and dental point of view.’"

Animals avoided the facility where the hydrogen fluoride was used. All microorganisms were killed, so food left in the facility would never decay. The hydrogen fluoride etched the facility’s windows and the workers' glasses, so they needed to be continually replaced. The workers also developed lesions and a type of “sunburn” from working there. Nearby elementary schools had their windows etched from hydrogen fluoride releases.

Hodge was dead when Griffiths and Bryson discovered the damning declassified documents, but Ast was still alive and was named in the documents as active in the nuclear establishment's damage-control efforts. Griffiths and Bryson confronted Ast with the declassified documents' revelations. Ast pulled a Ronald Reagan and claimed no recollection of those activities.

There were major studies performed by the government on fluorine during those World War II days and shortly thereafter. With the exception of the declassified version of the report published in JADA in 1948, the others remained classified, despite significant efforts by Griffiths and Bryson to get them declassified using the Freedom of Information Act. One entire area of study still classified is that regarding the effects of fluorine on the central nervous system. Recently declassified memos show that on April 29, 1944, Colonel Warren approved a Central Nervous System ("CNS") research proposal. Hodge wrote the proposal. The memo accompanying the proposal said:

"Clinical evidence suggests that (uranium hexafluoride) may have a rather marked central nervous system effect with mental confusion, drowsiness and lassitude as the conspicuous features. It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor."[50]

The proposal remains classified, as do the research results. Another declassified document dated six months after the proposal orders the research stopped. That sent my head spinning. Right-wingers have been saying since the 1950s that fluoridation was a plot to numb American brains so they could be easily herded. I had heard for years that fluoride administered to a bull made it docile and easy to handle. I have read repeatedly that both the Nazis and Soviets used it in their prison camps to keep the prisoners’ brains numbed, to make them docile. In his right wing classic Murder by Injection, Eustace Mullins made the case that Alzheimer’s disease is largely caused by the ubiquity of aluminum and fluorine in the nation’s food and water supply. There is increasing evidence for that assertion.[51] Mullins mentioned the Soviet studies from 1940 showing how fluorine in the water supply was helpful in running their Gulag system, with brain-numbed prisoners, attested to by others.[52]

In the appendix of Murder by Injection Mullins presented a frightening fluoridation story. At the end of World War II, as the USA was scrambling to snatch up as many Nazi scientists as possible and keep them from the Soviet Union's clutches, American industrialists were sent to Europe to perform many duties, including mopping up German Industries. One prominent scientist sent over was Charles Eliot Perkins. His job was to help take over the I.G. Farben chemical plants. I.G. Farben was the most infamous and largest of the German cartels. Farben ran the rubber factory at Auschwitz that was staffed with concentration camp labor. Farben also made the Zyklon-B gas used in the gas chambers.

In a letter Perkins wrote on October 2, 1954 to the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Perkins made the startling statement that a German chemist, who was a prominent Nazi, told him that the German General Staff had approved a comprehensive population control plan to use on subject populations. It amounted to mind control, and an essential plan element was to “medicate” the water supplies, mainly with sodium fluoride. Perkins wrote:

“However, I want to make this very definite and very positive - the real reason behind water fluoridation is not to benefit children’s teeth…The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty.” Perkins said that putting fluoride in the water supply eventually numbs the brain, making people easily manipulated. Perkins stated “…any person who drinks fluoridated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person, mentally or physically.”[53]

One friend remarked, when he heard the history of fluoridation, that at least the Soviets and Germans used it or intended to use it on prisoners. In the USA, it is used on the general population.

The above revelations open a Pandora’s Box regarding the mental effects of fluorinated drugs and chemicals. Freons have psychoactive effects, and is the tip of the iceberg regarding fluorinated drugs and chemicals. The Germans were leaders in such research. During World War II the Germans invented the first nerve gas, Soman. It is a fluorinated chemical. In 1939, the scientists at Farben invented Sarin, which is the most deadly nerve gas next to VX. Sarin is an acronym of the initials of the Farben scientists who developed it. Sarin was going to replace Zyklon B in the gas chambers, but the war ended before mass production could begin. Sarin is also a fluorinated chemical, a close cousin of Soman, and the EPA published a chemical profile on Sarin, after Gulf War Syndrome veterans (who think that Sarin may be responsible for their disease) pressured the government, which showed that the fluorine atom was its active ingredient.[54]

Rohypnol, the notorious drug used in date rapes, is fluorinated Valium, which makes it more than 20 times as potent as normal Valium. Prozac is another fluorinated drug. In all, there are hundreds of fluorinated drugs, and many have profound mental effects, including memory loss. The primary effect of psychoactive drugs is inhibiting enzyme production, which the fluorine ion is well known to do. In light of other facts surrounding fluoridation, this begins treading frightening territory. Fluoridation promoters and others often laugh off such situations as the workings of hopelessly paranoid minds. In light of declassified memos regarding U.S. CNS experiments of 70 years ago (at nearly the same time the Nazis and Soviets were doing similar kinds of experiments), and the studies that are performed across the world on fluoridation and intelligence, I am not laughing. In the 1990s, two studies in China showed a drop in IQ of children exposed to fluoride in the water supply of between 5 and 19 points.[55]

In other unsettling revelations, documents surfaced that revealed that when the Newburgh New York fluoridation trials were run, testing fluoride’s mental effects on the subject children was planned, and tissue samples were secretly tested at the University of Rochester. The results of those tests have yet to be made public.

In Mullins’s book, he attributed the fluoridation push as a mind-control ploy by the “Rockefeller Syndicate.” Mullins stated that the Rockefellers paid Ewing’s astronomical salary at ALCOA in order to set up his tenure at the Federal Security Agency. The Rockefeller name has come up repeatedly in the area of social control in my studies. John Taylor Gatto is a two-time New York City Teacher of the Year. Gatto taught for 26 years in inner city New York. Gatto is an anomaly in teaching. He was widely recognized as one of the best teachers America has to offer, but he was highly critical of our educational system. In 1992, he wrote Dumbing us Down, a monograph he published after retiring from the New York City school system. Dumbing us Down is a devastating critique of America’s compulsory school system, and how it beats the humanity out of children and “dumbs us down.”

Gatto became an education activist since he retired from the New York City school system. In Dumbing us Down is the speech he gave when he accepted the 1990 Teacher of the Year award, winning the award for the second consecutive year. Gatto identified several men, including Horace Mann and William Harper, as primary designers of our modern schools, which he stated are “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.”[56] Harper was from the University of Chicago, an institution that John Rockefeller rebuilt at the turn of the century. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie also took over American medicine a century ago, leading to the knives-and-drugs paradigm that dominates Western medicine today.

It is easy to become lost in bureaucratic and statistical tangles, and lose sight of the bigger picture. Our nation was pursuing the most destructive technology of all time. The first practical application of it was dropping bombs on women and children, and then publicly lie about who it was dropped on and why.[57]

Dr. Phyllis Mullenix, a toxicologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, who also worked in neuropathology at Harvard Medical School, performed research into fluoride and the intelligence of rats. In 1982, she was asked to perform the research as part of her studies on the toxicity of therapeutic agents used in treating leukemia and other diseases. Mullenix was invited to work at the Forsyth Dental Center, arguably the world’s leading dental research institute. Five years later, her research was underway.

Mullenix found a significant diminishment of rat intelligence when they were subjected to fluoride in their water supply. During Mullenix’s research, she was surprised that there were virtually no published studies regarding fluorine and its effects on the human brain.

Some interesting news was the help she had. Brought in as a consultant on Mullenix’s research was Harold Hodge. He was quite old in the early 1990s. During Hodge’s consulting of Mullenix’s work, he never mentioned the CNS studies that he proposed 50 years earlier. He almost certainly oversaw the 1940s research himself. When shown the newly declassified memos that clearly spell out Hodge’s active role in CNS research on fluorine, Mullenix said she was “flabbergasted.” Mullenix eventually came to see Hodge as a “monster” who actually steered her research toward studying fluoride effects on the central nervous system, probably to see what the results would really be, as the CNS experiments from the 1940s may have been prematurely terminated. Mullenix came to feel that Hodge and one of his University of Rochester pals used her “like a little puppet.”[58] When Mullenix tried interesting the NIDR in the declassified memos, she was rudely treated like a “crackpot.” The NIDR is evidently part of the American government’s damage control effort on fluoride’s harmful effects.

When Mullenix read the declassified study on fluorine and the dental health of Manhattan Project workers and compared it to the originally published version, she said, “This makes me ashamed to be a scientist.” Mullenix openly wondered if all other studies done on fluoridation safety were done like that one. Only the federal government knows for sure, in its secret archives.[59]

Mullenix is another casualty of the fluoride wars. She had nothing to do with the fluoride issue originally, but became involved as part of her work, when steered into it by Hodge. All she “knew” about fluoride when she started was that it was supposedly good for teeth. She did not initiate her research, but was doing it because she was asked. Her research results were published in Neurotoxicology and Teratology (Vol.17, No. 2, pp.169-177, 1995), the leading scientific journal in the field. Before that paper was published, she presented her findings at the NIDR in Maryland, a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH). When she arrived at the NIDR, in her words, "I had no idea what I was getting into. I walked into the main corridors there and all over the walls was 'The Miracle of Fluoride'. That was my first real kick-in-the-pants as to what was actually going on." She said the display ridiculed people who were against fluoridation. "I thought, 'Oh great!' Here's the main NIH hospital talking about the 'Miracle of Fluoride' and I'm giving a seminar to the NIDR telling them that fluoride is neurotoxic!"[60] After her presentation she met with toothpaste representatives who asked her if she was saying that their products lowered the IQs of children, and Mullenix responded with, “Basically, yes.” That marked the end of her career.

When she excitedly announced to her employers that her paper on the intelligence of rats was being published, three days later she was fired. Her employers asked her which journal was going to publish her work. By that time, she realized that they wanted to block its publication, so she did not tell them. Subsequently, funding has dried up for that kind of research, although immediately after Mullenix was fired, Colgate gave a $250,000 grant to Forsyth (for a job well done?). The unique equipment Mullenix developed to test rat intelligence was mysteriously destroyed before she could recover it.

Dr. Mullenix was then given an unfunded research position at Children's Hospital in Boston, but with no equipment or money. Mullenix said, "The people at Children's Hospital, for heaven's sake, came right out and said they were scared because they knew how important the fluoride issue was…Even at Forsyth they told me I was endangering funds for the institution if I published that information."[61]

Mullenix has since applied to the NIH for a research grant to further her research, and was turned down. The NIH told her that fluoride had no CNS effects, period. How the NIH concluded that, when virtually the only published research shows deleterious effects, is curious indeed. The work Mullenix did, as well as other recent studies, has shown that the fluoride ion is particularly damaging to the brain's hippocampal region, which is its learning center.[62]

Mullenix’s fate is common, and this website documents many instances of scientists and others arriving at the “wrong” answers, and having their careers destroyed. Other scientists who had their careers ruined for coming up with the “wrong” answer regarding fluoridation include Dr. Allan S. Gray of British Columbia and Dr. John Colquhon of Auckland, New Zealand.

In light of Hodge’s secret work for the Manhattan Project, and the secret memos and secret studies that are the tip of the iceberg, every pro-fluoridation effort that uses Hodge’s name is tainted. It was therefore with interest that I read Fluoride and Dental Caries, published in 1986. The book is a compendium on fluoridation that draws on various experts in the field. Hodge co-wrote a chapter on fluoride toxicity and also wrote a chapter dealing with objections to fluoridation. Reading that book was another enlightening process, when I recovered from my anger. The book gives the appearance of looking at fluoridation from many aspects, but appearance is the operative word. Hodge’s work is suspect, to put it mildly, and I looked there first.

Hodge’s co-author on the toxicology chapter was another fluoridation luminary: Frank Smith from the University of Rochester. Smith co-authored many works with Hodge and was active in producing/massaging data to protect industry and government from liability claims.[63] It is instructive to see the blind spots in their work, and what they were obviously hiding. When Smith and Hodge stated that “No substantive evidence of ill health has ever been offered in children or adults as a result of consuming drinking water containing optimal concentrations of fluoride,”[64] they were voicing the nuclear establishment’s damage control opinion, because there is substantial evidence of harm, but they chose to ignore it. When they wrote, “Since the Danish experience (in the 1930s) crippling fluorosis in an industrial setting has never been seen in the United States or Europe,”[65] a grain of salt needs to be taken with that statement. With just one declassified study, out of many that exist and are still secret, definite harm occurred, although by playing semantics games they were not “crippled,” merely toothless, although the long-term effects are unknown, which may be in another classified study. People becoming violently ill from du Pont’s fluoride cloud are invisible victims, at least to the public, when Hodge and Smith wrote their masterpiece of disinformation. The worst air pollution disaster in American history happened in October 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania, when an air inversion layer formed over the town for four days, and fluoride emissions from U.S. Steel’s zinc and steel facilities killed 20 people and seriously injured hundreds more. If the inversion layer had lasted one more day, a thousand people may have died. U.S. Steel and the PHS conspired to cover-up the disaster, and records are missing to this day.[66]

Throughout Fluoride and Dental Caries were instances of “looking” at objections to fluoridation, and the appearance of carefully considering them was undertaken. The close relationship between ALCOA, the other fluoride polluters and the early fluoridation researchers is nowhere mentioned, although it is well documented and is consistently one of the biggest issues raised by fluoridation's opponents. A table on the “anti-science” arguments against fluoridation was produced on page 130, in a chapter titled “Legal, Social and Economics Aspects of Fluoridation,” that even mentioned the “Communist conspiracy” aspect of fluoridation. Nowhere was mentioned the obvious economic incentives of fluoride polluters to manage the fluoridation issue, and the well-documented instances of them funding and influencing the fluoridation research, even when it was merely the smoking gun of conflict of interest. The authors of that chapter, including the book’s editor, used the words “pseudoscientist” and “quack” to describe fluoridation opponents and their “anti-science.” In the chapter purporting to look at the broad spectrum of issues regarding fluoridation, the ALCOA and fluoride polluter issue was spectacularly absent.

In Fluoride and Dental Caries, one area caught my interest. In Hodge’s chapter on fluoridation objections, he presented experimental evidence by chemists that showed the fluorine ion benign to human chemistry. The research was used to discredit John Yiamouyiannis, who uses the very same research to show how the fluorine ion wreaks havoc in the body. Hodge interpreted the original research, qualifying and minimizing the conclusions, and then he presented the experimental work of pro-fluoridation pal Armstrong. Hodge concluded that the research showed that the fluorine ion was relatively harmless by itself. It was the first time that I had seen Yiamouyiannis's science challenged, beyond his cancer statistic analyses with Dean Burk. With knowing Hodge’s extreme and formerly secret bias, I cannot trust his writing, particularly regarding the fluoride ion and human harm, but it was interesting reading. When anybody is proven a systematic liar, how can anything that they say be believed? How can fact and fiction be separated? The only way I know is to entirely reject their work and become my own expert.

Here are some quotes regarding the biological damage the fluorine ion does to human health, the kind not found in pro-fluoridation propaganda such as Fluoride and Dental Caries.

"Fluorides are general protoplasmic poisons, probably because of their capacity to modify the metabolism of cells by changing the permeability of the cell membrane and by inhibiting certain enzyme systems. The exact mechanism of such actions is obscure." - Journal of the American Medical Association, Sept 18, 1943. (before the propaganda really got going in 1947)

"The fluoride ion exerts its toxic effect by inhibiting the action of many enzyme systems." - Hugo Theorell, M.D., Nobel Prize winner for his research in the field of enzyme chemistry.

"We ought to go slowly. Everybody knows that fluorine and fluorides are very poisonous substances and we use them in enzyme chemistry to poison enzymes, those vital agents in the body. That is the reason things are poisoned; because enzymes are poisoned, and that is why animals and plants die." - James B. Sumner, Director of Enzyme Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition, Cornell University, and a Nobel Prize winner for his work in the field of enzyme chemistry.

"The data indicated that drinking water with as little as 1 PPM shortened the life span of mice an average of nine per cent. This was true whether death was due to cancer or non-cancerous diseases. The only notice proponents of fluoridation gave to this work was to discredit it as much as possible. ... In experiments where the drug was added directly to suspensions of cancer tissue before inoculation into eggs or mice, sodium fluoride stimulated the growth of cancer tissue in concentrations of one part in more than 20 million. Scientists at Cambridge University (British Medical Journal, Oct 26, 1963) discovered that concentrations of sodium fluoride as low as one part in ten million inhibited the growth of a culture of human tissue. ... the growing weight of scientific evidence that water-borne fluorides, even at 1 PPM, have toxic possibilities must finally be recognized." - Alfred Taylor, Ph.D., Clayton Foundation, Biochemical Institute, University of Texas, Austin Texas, 1965.

"The terrifying conclusion of the studies was that fluorine greatly induced a cancer tumor’s growth. If doctors and the public can be made aware of this catastrophe, fluoridation shall end quickly. It will someday be recognized as the most lethal and stupid "Health Program" ever conceived by the mind of man, witch doctors and blood-letters not excepted."

"In 1969 the country of Sweden intended to fluoridate their water supply due to the strong advice of Professor Yngve Ericsson, a Swedish dentist who was also the senior representative on the World Health Organization's Expert Committee on Fluoridation. However, it was then found that Professor Ericsson coincidentally was the holder of two highly-profitable patents on fluoride toothpaste!" - Alfred Taylor, June 13, 1970 the Gothenburg Post (Sweden); August 5, 1970 the News Register (Sweden); and May 1, 1970 Norsk Folkehelselag (Norway).

"In 1978, the West German Association of Water and Gas Experts rejected fluoridation for legal reasons, and because ‘the so-called optimal fluoride concentration of 1mg/liter is close to the dose at which long-term damage to the human body is to be expected.’" - Chemical and Engineering News, August 1, 1988.

The tremendous blind spots regarding fluoride polluters, diet and caries, the severe biases regarding the harm done by fluorides, and Hodge’s secret mission on behalf of the nuclear establishment rendered Fluoride and Dental Caries virtually worthless, except as an instructive exercise in propaganda. With the now-known nuclear industry’s active though secret management of the fluoridation issue, books such as Fluoride and Dental Caries are examples of “pseudoscience” in the strongest sense.

The situation of industry and government corrupting science is far from confined to the fluoridation issue. Today, ethyl alcohol, the substance that every drunkard knows well, is added to American gasoline to increase its octane rating. It works great. It was also used before 1920. In the 1920s, ethyl alcohol was replaced by tetraethyl lead as an octane booster. Why? As it turns out, nobody could patent ethyl alcohol and make monopoly profits from putting it into gasoline. Therefore, General Motors, Standard Oil and du Pont conspired to make a new, patentable chemical, and tetraethyl lead was introduced into American gas tanks. Although Ben Franklin remarked on lead’s well-known toxic qualities hundreds of years ago, and even ancient Romans and Greeks wrote of its toxic properties, industrially-funded scientists in the 20^th century labored mightily to make lead appear safe to ingest, even though they knew how deadly tetraethyl lead really was. It is unknown just how many people became sick and died from the effects of lead being spewed into the air during the era of tetraethyl lead, but it is not inconsiderable. In 1985, the EPA estimated 5,000 lead-related heart disease deaths per year, prior to the tetraethyl lead phase out. The lead content of American bloodstreams fell precipitously since tetraethyl lead was outlawed.

The most notorious of the industrial laboratories that produced the lead “research” was Kettering Laboratories.[67] For generations, Kettering and its industrial sponsors controlled all lead research. The “Kettering” of Kettering Laboratories was Charles Kettering, the inventor and General Motors executive. Kettering Laboratories is not the only “medical” foundation that he helped bankroll. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s leading cancer research institute, is named after Kettering and his friend, General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan, another noted “philanthropist.” Kettering Laboratories was also instrumental in making aluminum appear benign. McClure had high praise for Edward Largent and Kettering Laboratories in his Water Fluoridation: The Search and the Victory. Largent and Kettering were involved in covering-up the harmful effects of fluoride, and Largent secretly worked for the federal government, possibly on the Manhattan Project.[68] Christopher Bryson unearthed original research that Kettering performed in the 1950s, which showed that inhaling airborne fluorides caused an emphysema-like condition, which countless Americans downwind from fluoride facilities have suffered from. Kettering buried the research results because they came up with the “wrong” answer, but did not have “national security” to cover their tracks, so Bryson discovered it in his research.[69]

On a lighter note, below is a cartoon that sums up fluoridation, although it was a general-purpose cartoon dealing with similar corporate malfeasance. Replace the words “toxic sludge” with fluoride, and the cartoon sums up the story of fluoridation. Tom Tomorrow is the funniest political cartoonist I have ever seen. The below cartoon was so inspired that a book was named after it.[70]

Anne-Lise Gotzsche’s The Fluoride Question, Panacea or Poison? is an excellent survey of fluoridation. She was a medical journalist in London who investigated fluoridation for years. She demonstrated a sensible attitude and took both the pro and anti-fluoridation people to task when needed. The book is an easy read and covers the main issues surrounding fluoridation, although written before the more pernicious conflicts of interest of fluoridation’s proponents were discovered. As with anybody who looks into fluoridation and is not on the payroll of a bureaucracy or corporation that promotes fluoride, Gotzsche demonstrated how shamelessly political the fluoridation effort was. Science was trampled in the rush to fluoridate. Many scientists went so far overboard that they became evangelists instead of scientists. Some began making up the science as they went along, such as the infamous Frederick Stare. Stare made up a concept called “mineral nutrient fluoride,” a pro-fluoridation idea so unfounded that even the PHS shot it down.[71] Fluoridation pioneer Basil Bibby even recommended adding lead fluoride to the water supplies in 1945. Gotzsche discussed that whatever the propaganda about helping teeth, dentists’ business goes up in fluoridated areas, not down. By 1970, Newburgh, New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan, the recipients of the first trial fluoridation experiments, had twice the dentists per capita as the national average.[72]

Gotzsche said that calling groups engaged in the huge international push to fluoridate water the “dental mafia” was “naïve,” but felt that those thinking that way could perhaps be forgiven, given the facts. Her book was published in 1975. In light of Harold Hodge’s connections, “mafia” may not be far from the mark.

After looking into the fluoridation issue long and hard, here are my conclusions.

The good news is that there have been some significant victories. For one thing, the vast majority (95%) of humanity does not drink artificially fluoridated water. The largest populations subject to compulsory fluoridation are England and its former colonies, such as Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, whose citizens consume nearly half of the world’s fluoridated water. Europe’s population is less than 2% fluoridated, and many places have stopped fluoridating their water supplies, while others have successfully resisted having fluoride added to their water, including American and Canadian cities. EPA scientists spoke out against fluoridation in the late 1990s. There are many sources of fluoridation information on the Internet. I am one of many people writing about fluoridation. There are many scientists and others waging political action today to end the insanity of fluoridation, and they need all the help they can get. We all will determine whether we keep drinking poison every day. It is up to all of us.

In ending this essay, it comes down to common sense. Tooth decay is primarily caused by our diet, and changing our diet is the only effective solution. Adding a well-known poison to the water supply to “prevent” tooth decay is not only insane, but also suicidal. It also has “coincidentally” been a windfall for fluorine polluters, both corporate and governmental. Instead of having to bear the huge costs of disposing of their highly toxic fluoride waste, large corporations now can sell it to water suppliers and toothpaste manufacturers! Fluoridation may also be part of a mind control program. The history of fluoridation is a horror story. Most people subject to fluoridation have no idea of its dark history, which demonstrates how effective our propaganda and indoctrination systems are. Walk into an average grocery store and try finding toothpaste that does not have fluoride in it (I have been queried repeatedly on this issue; Americans can find non-fluoridated toothpaste in health and "progressive" food stores…for now, although be careful, as they are right next to fluoridated toothpaste, even in "progressive" stores).

Many people discussed why Orwell’s dark prophecies were wrong, and why 1984 did not happen. The irony is that it appears as if we are living in Orwell’s world today. The fluoride situation is just one of many that this website presents. Evidence of Orwell's prescience is that people do not think they live in that kind of world. The most effective propaganda and indoctrination system is one where its victims do not think they are being propagandized and indoctrinated. The USA has the most effective and subtle propaganda systems that the world has ever seen, by far.

[1] Professional chemists will be more precise and say that fluorine is the most “electronegative” element, meaning that it is the most aggressive electron “thief,” because the alkali metals are the most “electropositive” elements, meaning their affinity to “give away” an electron, and electronegativity and electropositivity are not easy to compare, as far as “reactivity” goes. However, francium, probably the most electropositive element, is very rare, while fluorine is far more common and more “coercive,” such as when it ended the “inert” status of “noble” gases. So most “electronegative” is more technically accurate, while I consider most “reactive” more practical.

[2] Hydrofluoric acid eats glass containers, so it is usually stored in containers without glass. I remember seeing a bottle of hydrofluoric acid in my first chemistry lab. The bottle was corroded and looked dangerous to touch. It is highly dangerous to handle, rapidly eating the flesh it touches. What makes hydrofluoric acid doubly dangerous is that as it eats flesh it also produces anesthetic effects (those nervous system effects are discussed in this essay), which deadens the pain as it eats the flesh, so people do not notice the damage done until too late. People can die from a mere whiff of hydrogen fluoride. In my years in chemistry labs I used hydrochloric, sulfuric, nitric, phosphoric, and other acids, but I never saw hydrofluoric acid used, even as a demonstration. It was simply too dangerous. If a fluorine truck wrecks and spills its contents, throwing water on it is useless, because the fluorine gas will actually burn the water.

[3] See Olivier Barbier, et al., “Molecular mechanisms of fluoride toxicity,” Chemico-Biological Interactions, August 3, 2010. See N. Agalakova and G. Gusev, “Molecular Mechanisms of Cytotoxicity and Apoptosis Induced by Inorganic Fluoride,” Russian Academy of Sciences, International Scholarly Research Network, Journal of Cell Biology, Volume 2012, Article ID 403835.

[4] See Olivier Barbier, et al., “Molecular mechanisms of fluoride toxicity,” Chemico-Biological Interactions, August 3, 2010.

[5] See John Yiamouyiannis's Fluoride and the Aging Factor, chapter 11.

[6] See Nick Lane’s The Vital Question, pp. 244-251.

[7] See Nick Lane’s The Vital Question, chapter 7.

[8] See John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's Toxic Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 209-212, for a copy of the public relations strategy of Clorox regarding bad environmental news regarding chlorine, and the book in general for how corporations wage war against environmental activists. See also David Helvag's The War Against the Greens for a broad overview of corporate efforts against environmentalists, including criminal acts.

[9] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, pp. 61-63.

[10] See Kaj Roholm's Fluorine Intoxication, pp. 64-65. Cited in Joel Griffiths's “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalistic Ploy,” Covert Action, Fall 1992.

[11] See H. Ost's “The Fight Against Injurious Industrial Gases,” Z Agnew Chem, Volume 20, 1907. pp. 1689-93, and Roholm, pp. 36-41, cited in Joel Griffiths's “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalistic Ploy,” Covert Action, Fall 1992.

[12] See Kaj Roholm's “The Fog Disaster in the Meuse Valley: A Fluorine Intoxication,” Journal of Industrial Toxicology, Vol. 19, 1937, pp. 126-137, cited in Joel Griffiths's “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalistic Ploy,” Covert Action, Fall 1992.

[13] See Robert J. Lillie's “Air Pollutants Affecting the Performance of Domestic Animals,” US Department of Agriculture Handbook No. 380, August 1970, p.41, cited in Joel Griffiths's “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalistic Ploy,” Covert Action, Fall 1992. See Anne-Lise Gotzsche's The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, chapter 6.

[14] Reproduced in John Yiamouyiannis's Fluoride and the Aging Factor, p. 99.

[15] See John Yiamouyiannis's Fluoride and the Aging Factor, p. 94.

[16] See W.D. Armstrong and L. Singer's “Fluoride Contents of Enamel of Sound and Carious Human Teeth: A Reinvestigation.” J. Dent. Res., 42:133-136, 1963, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p.84, n.24.

[17] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, chapter 14, pp. 176-183.

[18] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, pp. 61, 80-81.

[19] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, pp. 47-54.

[20] See Anne-Lise Gotzsche's The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, p. 21.

[21] See P.R.N. Sutton's Fluoridation: Errors and Omissions in Experimental Trials. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Australia, 1959, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p. 205, n. 61. See also chapters 12, 17, 18, and 19 of Waldbott. See Anne-Lise Gotzsche's The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, pp. 61-65.

[22] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, p. 32.

[23] See John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's Toxic Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 1, 22-32. See also Stewart Ewen’s PR!, A Social History of Spin.

[24] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, chapter 17, pp. 217-229.

[25] See Anne-Lise Gotzsche's The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, p. 31. Here is a relevant quote, "We have told the public that fluoridation works, so we can't go back on that." - F.A. Bull, at the 1951 Dental Health Conference in Washington, D.C.

[26] See discussion of The Inquisition's current state in chapter 7 of Baigent and Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception.

[27] See Harold Hodge's “Research Needs in the Toxicology of Food Additives.” Food Cosmet. Toxicol., 1:25-31, 1963, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p.109, n.25.

[28] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma. p. 55.

[29] See L.M. Dalderup's “Nutrition and Caries,” World Rev Nutr. Diet., 7:72-137, 1967, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's, Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p. 55.

[30] See Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, chapter 22, table 2, for a summary. See also David Kennedy's How to Save Your Teeth, pp. 2-3.

[31] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, pp. 283-285.

[32] See D.F. Radusch's "Variability of Diagnosis of Incidence of Dental Caries," Journal of the ADA, 28:1959-1961, 1941. See Cf. Ennis Ler. R. "Oral Roentgenology and its Possibilities." Journal of the ADA., 21: 1367-1421, 1934, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p. 205, n. 59.

[33] See chapter 12 of Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, for a sampling of the data not conforming to the rush to fluoridate.

[34] For dental decay data, see Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, especially chapter 12. See also Julian Whitaker's Reversing Heart Disease. pp. 60-62. See also John Robbins's Diet for a New America. pp. 151-154.

[35] See R. Aasenden and T.C. Peebles's “Effects of Fluoride Supplementation from Birth on Human Deciduous and Permanent Teeth”, Arch. Oral. Biol., 19: 321-326, 1974, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p. 202, n.17.

[36] See S.S. Jolly, et al.'s "Endemic Fluorosis in Punjab II", Dental Aspect, Fluoride, 6:106-112, 1973, cited in Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, p. 202, n.18.

[37] See the conservative chapter 18 of Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma, or the highly charged chapters 17 to 19 in Yiamouyiannis’ Fluoride and the Aging Factor for many examples of the kind of abuse of power this web site chronicles in many places. Anne-Lise Gotzsche’s The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison? is another good overview of how the fluoridation establishment works.

[38] See Waldbott, Burgstahler, and McKinney's Fluoridation, The Great Dilemma. pp. 324-332.

[39] U.S. Congressman, Dr. A. L. Miller, Chairman, Special Committee on Chemicals in Foods, "Fluoridation of Water, Extension of Remarks, Congressional Record, March 25, 1952. pp. A1899-A1901. Cited in John Yiamouyiannis's Fluoride and the Aging Factor, pp. 140-142.

[40] Research of George Glasser. Glasser’s investigation and the ACLU’s response, both occurring in January of 1997 have been posted on the Internet.

[41] In 1990 William Marcus, an EPA scientist, was fired for a memo he wrote which called for a review of a cover-up of toxicology studies that showed fluoride was a "probable human carcinogen." Marcus won a whistle-blower lawsuit and was reinstated at the EPA. In 1997 the Union of Government Scientists of the United States Environmental Protection Agency voted unanimously to sponsor a California initiative to ban fluoridation, citing eleven years of review of the medical evidence which indicates a “causal link” between fluoride and “cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment and bone pathology.” Taken from their statement of July 2, 1997.

[42] New York Times, January 20, 1979, cited in David Kennedy's How to Save Your Teeth, pp. 133-135.

[43] See L.E. Church's “Fluorides - Use with Caution”, Journal of Maryland Dentistry, 1976, cited in Harold Hodge's “Fluoride Toxicology” in Newbrun, Ernest, eds., Fluorides and Caries Prevention. pp. 203-204, 218, n. 9.

[44] See W.K. Duncan, S.L. Silberman, and A Trubman's - "Labial hypoplasia of primary canines in black Head Start children" ASDC J Dent Child 55(6):423-6 (1988). See Silberman SL, Duncan WK, Trubman A, Meydrech EF - "Primary canine hypoplasia in Head Start children" J Public Health Dent 49(1):15-8 (1989). See Y Li, J.M Navia, and J.Y Bian's -"Caries experience in deciduous dentition of rural Chinese children 3-5 years old in relation to the presence or absence of enamel hypoplasia" Caries Res 30(1):8-15 (1996), and R.P. Ellwood and D. O'Mullane's - "The association between developmental enamel defects and caries in populations with and without fluoride in their drinking water" J Public Health Dent 56(2):76-80(1996), cited in "Fluoride - What's Wrong With This Picture?" Andreas Schuld posted it to the Internet in 2000.

[45] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, pp. 69-77.

[46] Regarding this matter, see Undue Risk by Jonathan Moreno, which documents the undeniable human experiments that the United States performed on often unwitting and unwilling people. Although Moreno is takes it far too easy on our government’s crimes, it is a good introduction. A better effort is Andrew Goliszek’s chilling In the Name of Science.

[47] See Philip Klass's “The ‘Top Secret UFO Papers’ NSA Won’t Release”, The Skeptical Inquirer. Fall, 1989, pp. 65-68.

[48] See also Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, p. 50.

[49] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, chapter 9, pp. 78-90.

[50] That document can be seen in Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, in the pictures section. It can also be found on the Internet.

[51] High aluminum concentrations have been found in the brains of Alzheimer’s victims, and the appearance of Alzheimer’s has coincided with the introduction of aluminum cookware. Also, “In January 1987, experiments performed at the Medical Research Endocrinology Dept., Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and the Physics Dept of the Univ. of Ruhana, Sri Lanka, showed that fluoridated water at 1 PPM, when used in cooking in aluminum cookware, concentrated the aluminum up to 600 PPM, whereas water without fluoride did not.” (Science News (131:73)). That research was also confirmed in America when the research results in England and Sri Lanka were investigated. A test was performed on Antigo Wisconsin water. Antigo had been fluoridated for 33 years. The water was examined by a certified Wisconsin laboratory, and showed that when used in cooking with aluminum cookware, it concentrated the aluminum by 833 times, and increased the fluoride content by 100%. That made that water's aluminum content 75 times higher than the maximum allowed by the WHO. That information is taken from a paper by Isabel Jansen, R.N. (Journal of the National Academy of Research Biochemists - Jan/Feb '90). To pursue the Alzheimer's-aluminum connection further, one place to start is the letter and references of Dr. William Grant's letter to the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, p. 92, in the June 1999 issue. For some information on the Alzheimer's and aluminum connection, see Masahiro Kawaharaand Midori Kato-Negishi's "Link between Aluminum and the Pathogenesis of Alzheimer's Disease: The Integration of the Aluminum and Amyloid Cascade Hypotheses", International Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, March 8, 2011: 276393.

[52] For instance, during the Un-American hearings during the McCarthy days, USAF Major George R. Jordan testified to his duties of securing vast quantities of sodium fluoride and shipping it to Siberia during World War II. The Russian fluoride recipients openly told Jordan that they were "... using the fluoride in the water supplies in their concentration camps, to make the prisoners stupid, docile, and subservient.”

[53] Cited in Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, pp. 353-354. See this account.

[54] This quote is from Section VII of the EPA Chemical Profile on Sarin of October 31, 1987, regarding the neutralization of Sarin: "Rapidly hydrolyzed by dilute aqueous sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate forming relatively non-toxic products. Water alone removes the fluorine atom, producing a non-toxic acid (Merck 1983, p. 1204)."

[55] Studies cited in San Diego Business Wire, Nov. 29, 1996. Cited by Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, at AOLNewsProfiles@aol.net. Several Chinese studies have reported from places of naturally high fluoride concentration, and in coal mining areas.

[56] See John Gatto's Dumbing us Down, p. 26.

[57] Recently declassified documents have shed much light on other World War II-era events, such as hiring the Nazis to staff the CIA’s intelligence network in Europe, which took humanity to the brink of World War III, as the Nazis lied to America about Soviet military capability and intentions. There are cases of Nazi doctors performing human experiments in the death camps, and going on the U.S. payroll weeks later. Regarding the decision to drop the atomic bombs, the official rationales have been strained since the beginning. For a hint of what it was like to be a Japanese school child, playing near Ground Zero in Hiroshima while that lone plane flew overhead, read Day One by Peter Wyden. Listen to this audio clip of the announcement that Truman made after we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He lied to the American people by calling Hiroshima a “military base.” That is similar to calling Salt Lake City a military base. At Ground Zero was a hospital, two hundred yards away from an elementary school.

[58] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, p 28.

[59] Mullenix’s experiences with Hodge, the NIH, and her reactions to the newly declassified documents were originally published in Griffiths and Bryson's “Fluoride, Teeth and the Atom Bomb”, July 1997. The Christian Science Monitor commissioned the article, but did not publish it. It is published on the Internet, as well as other articles regarding Mullenix’s findings and advocacy work she was doing. For those interested in more depth on the Mullenix/Hodge issue, I can recommend no recent work more highly than Christopher Bryson’s masterpiece, The Fluoride Deception, published in 2004. It was the book I had been waiting for since 1998.

[60] Those Mullenix quotes are from The Winds’s web site, which conducted an interview of her while researching their article, the Winds is gone, but a copy of the article is here.

[61] Those Mullenix quotes are from The Winds’s web site. The Winds is gone, but a copy of the article is here.

[62] Dr. Robert Isaacson of Binghamton University, New York conducted two studies using low levels of aluminum fluoride and sodium fluoride. The results were published in 1992 and 1994, predating Mullenix’s publication, and the results were similar. Isaacson’s study was spurred by data that showed Alzheimer’s disease having a higher incidence in fluoridated areas.

[63] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, p. 62.

[64] See Newbrun and Ernest, eds. Fluorides and Caries Prevention. p. 212.

[65] See Newbrun and Ernest, eds. Fluorides and Caries Prevention. p. 206.

[66] See Christopher Bryson’s “The Donora Fluoride Fog: A Secret History of America's Worst Air Pollution Disaster” in the fall 1998 issue of Earth Island Journal. He also devoted chapter 9 of The Fluoride Deception to that event.

[67] See the investigative report on that situation regarding tetraethyl lead in Jamie Lincoln Kitman’s special report to The Nation, titled “The Secret History of Lead”, in its March 20, 2000 issue.

[68] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, pp. 105-113.

[69] See Christopher Bryson’s The Fluoride Deception, chapter 15, pp. 184-201.

[70] See John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s Toxic Sludge is Good for You! In that book is the story of how a woman tried getting the authors to change the name of the book from “toxic sludge” to something such as “cigarettes.” Why? It turned out that the woman was a PR flack for…toxic sludge! In American sewage treatment, the planners short-sightedly commingled human with industrial sewage. Human waste is recyclable, industrial waste is not, at least not for fertilizing one’s garden. When the two are mixed, it is truly a toxic sludge, not fit for much except being buried along with the nuclear waste. The sewage managers, though, have sought to turn the toxic sludge into fertilizer, to be used on gardens and farms. Municipal sewage districts sell their sewer sludge today for that purpose. It is full of deadly industrial toxins, though. Truth is stranger than fiction, and the authors could hardly believe it when the PR flack tried getting them to rename their book, because it might create a bad name for…toxic sludge!

[71] See Anne-Lise Gotzsche’s The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, p. 79-80, 96, 168. The idea that fluoride is an essential nutrient is alive and well today, with the National Academy of Sciences publishing a report in 1997 titled "Dietary Reference Intakes” that lists fluoride right up there with calcium and Vitamin D. Many scientists protested it.

[72] See Anne-Lise Gotzsche’s The Fluoride Question: Panacea or Poison?, p. 8. A 1972 report by the ADA stated that dentists make 17% more profit in fluoridated areas as opposed to non-fluoridated areas (Douglas, et al.'s, "Impact of water fluoridation on dental practices and dental manpower", Journal of the American Dental Association; 84:355-67, 1972).

This section presents a brief chemistry narrative on fluorine and why it is such an important industrial chemical. Chemistry is one of the most empirical sciences. Much of chemistry is not theoretical, but the empirical result of what happens to substances under certain conditions. Chemicals are put together and chemists see what happens. Those observations over the years, summarized within the profession, make up a great deal of chemistry textbooks. Chemists measure how much energy is given off or absorbed by reactions, what the byproducts are, and so forth.

Many theories have been developed to account for experimental results, and many have stood the test of time while others have fallen by the wayside. That is the normal progress of any science, but chemistry has more empiricism and less theory than almost any other “hard” science, and is one of the more nascent. We have many theories, and they are useful, until a new discovery happens. Einstein said that every theory is eventually killed by a fact.

Chemistry is generally concerned with the ways that elements combine. An aspect of chemistry called nuclear chemistry began in the 20^th century. Most chemistry, however, is not concerned with an atom's nucleus, but with its electrons.

In “classical” chemistry, an atom's basic components are the nucleus and the electrons orbiting it. The nucleus is composed of two primary “particles”: protons and neutrons. In classical chemistry, a neutron is considered pure mass, and has no net electrical charge, which is why it is called a neutron, derived from neutral. It is now known that the neutron is further divisible, composed of other “particles.” That begins venturing into nuclear chemistry, which is not this essay's concern.

As of 2017, science had discovered 118 elements. A little more than 90 are naturally occurring, and scientists have artificially created the rest. All artificial elements are unstable, and thus are called radioactive, as they give off radiation and particles when they decay into simpler, more stable elements. Hydrogen has one proton in its nucleus, oxygen has eight, gold has 79, and so on. Each element has a unique number of protons. All atoms have neutrons in their nuclei, except the most common form of hydrogen. The neutron adds to an atom's mass, but has no net electrical charge.

Orbiting the nucleus are electrons. Electrons, according to current theory, have little mass but an electric charge equal to a proton, but the opposite. In a "normal" atom, the protons' positive charges and electrons' negative charges balance each other, and the atom's net electrical charge is zero.

Electrons orbit the nucleus in strange ways. The science of electrons and how they orbit is perhaps the weirdest mainstream science, called quantum mechanics. Electrons do not orbit the nucleus as Earth orbits the Sun, in an orderly ellipse - they jump all around, appearing and disappearing. Because atoms are so tiny, and electrons move at a significant fraction of light speed, observing exactly what electrons do is currently impossible, and quantum physics is one of the oddest and most difficult studies in science. Richard Feynman said that nobody really understood quantum theory. Einstein took great exception to some of quantum theory's cornerstones, and many observers believe that quantum theory will be radically altered when more is known. However, quantum theory has spawned rules and equations that agree well with what science has observed so far.

Electrons orbit the nucleus in “shells.” Each shell has distinct properties. The shells are the same for every element. As an atom gets larger, the shells closest to the nucleus are filled first, and the more distant ones are filled later. The shells have been calculated to contain 2, 8, 18, 32, 50, 72 and 98 electrons, respectively, and the last shells are more theoretical than actual, as those shells could accommodate 280 electrons, but the largest element yet observed is element 118 (even though its half-life is less than a millisecond, before it decays into simpler elements, and only a few atoms have been created). There are also subshells within electron shells, which form further patterns in how shells are filled. Hydrogen, the simplest element, has one electron. That electron inhabits the first shell, so that shell is “half full.” Helium has two electrons, which fill the first shell. Oxygen has eight electrons, which fill the first shell and six of eight positions in the second shell. So goes the periodic table, and each element has one more proton and electron than the previous one, and each successive electron shell gets filled. It is also slightly more complicated. As the third shell gets filled, the first eight electrons fill the third, then the next go to the fourth shell, then the third and fourth shells are filled together. For instance, potassium has 19 electrons, the 19^th residing as the first electron in the fourth shell, but the third is not yet filled (the first shell has 2, electrons, 8 in the second, and only 8 in the third, not the 18 it takes to fill it, so the electron layout for potassium is: 2 + 8 + 8 + 1 = 19). As the shells are filled, eight and eighteen become breaking points to begin filling subsequent shells. It is an orderly progression.

Those shells, and how full or empty they are, represent the essence of chemistry. An atom with a shell mostly filled “wants” another electron to help fill its shell. An atom with a shell mostly empty will give away those electrons in its outer shell easily. Oxygen, for instance, “wants” two more electrons to fill its shell. Sodium, element number 11, with one electron in its third shell (2 + 8 + 1 = 11), readily “gives away” that outermost electron. The closer an atom is to having its shells filled or empty, the more reactive it is. The periodic table of elements is designed along the electron shell layout. Elements with the same number of open positions in its shell, or excess electrons, behave similarly. Lithium, sodium, potassium and a few other elements have one “extra” electron, and belong to the “family” known as alkali metals. They are highly reactive, and react violently when put into water, and form caustic solutions. Sodium and water produces what is commonly called lye.

The elements with their electron shells perfectly filled, meaning 2, 10, 18, 36, 54 and 86 electrons, are in a family. Those elements “like” having their number of electrons and do not want any more, nor do they want to give any away. Those elements are all gases. They are called "noble" gases. Those gases are helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. Chemists thought for a long time that nothing would react with them, and they were called “inert.” To “react” means to either give electrons to, or take them from, other atoms. It also means sharing electrons and forming a “bond” between the atoms.

There is another prominent family of elements: those that need but one electron to fill their shells. Hydrogen is the only element that belongs in two families. Because hydrogen has one electron in a two-electron shell, it is either half empty or half full, depending on what it reacts with. Hydrogen can either take an electron or give one away. Hydrogen is therefore in the family that wants one more electron, and it also belongs to the alkali metal family, eager to give away one electron. The other elements that want one more electron are fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine. The family goes by the name “halogen,” which means “salt formers.”

In this short chemistry narrative, it may become obvious that the ideal match is putting an alkali metal with a halogen, as one wants to give away an electron, and the other wants to take one. That is precisely the most reactive situation that chemists know of. If potassium were put into fluorine gas, the reaction would happen so fast that it would be explosive. Halogens and alkali metals are the most reactive elemental families. Fluorine is the most reactive element known to science (although that can be disputed by chemists, who prefer saying that fluorine is the most “electronegative.”). The "inert" gases proved less inert than chemists originally thought. In 1962, chemists were able to combine xenon with fluorine and form xenon tetrafluoride, made of one xenon and four fluorine atoms. Many “inert” gas compounds were subsequently made, and were usually unstable compounds. Chemists stopped calling those gases inert and the term “noble” came into use.

The most abundant wedding of alkali metals and halogens on Earth is sodium chloride, more commonly called salt. With salt, as with the other alkali/halogen compounds, the electron is barely shared between the atoms; it is nearly seized from the metal by the halogen. Thus the chlorine atom has an extra electron, and the sodium atom has one less. The chlorine atom then takes on a net negative electrical charge and the sodium atom a positive one. Those charged atoms easily become “ions.” An ion is a free atom or molecule with a net electric charge. If salt is put into water, it dissolves, as the electron is cleanly taken from the sodium atom by the chlorine atom, and both atoms become ions and form an “ionic” solution. Because of the electrically charged ions, salt water is a fairly reactive solution, which is why cars parked next to the ocean rust as they do.

Most reactions between the elements are not as “perfect” as salt is. Usually the elements share electrons. Water is a standard case of that electron sharing. An oxygen atom wants two electrons, and hydrogen will give its electron away under the right conditions. Hydrogen and oxygen will form water, or H₂O. The oxygen atom does not seize the hydrogen’s electrons; instead, they are shared. If a water molecule could be seen, it would look similar to Mickey Mouse’s head, where the ears are hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom is Mickey’s skull. Although the hydrogen atoms are not ionized, the oxygen hogs the electrons. In a water molecule, the oxygen atom takes on a negative charge, while the hydrogen atoms gain a positive charge. Because of that atomic relationship, water is known as a polarized molecule, with electrical poles. Water is an unusual compound because of that polarity.

Because of that polarity, water molecules attract each other more than similar compounds. Water has a boiling point far higher than its constituent elements oxygen or hydrogen have, and water’s boiling point is also higher than methyl and ethyl alcohol, both of which have larger and heavier molecules. That is because the alcohol molecules are not as polarized. In water, the positively charged hydrogen atoms are attracted to the negatively charged oxygen atoms of neighboring molecules, forming a weak bond. That bond is known as a hydrogen bond. Hydrogen bonding makes water the unusual and miraculous substance that it is.

Every element and compound has “states.” Every substance has its solid, liquid or gaseous “state.” Oxygen is found as O₂ in nature. Atmospheric hydrogen and nitrogen are also found in their “diatomic” state. Oxygen melts at about -220° C. (-360° F.) and boils at about -180° C. (-300° F). The melting and boiling points of elements and compounds relate to the substance's “weight." In chemistry, the weights are called atomic and molecular weights. Electron shells determine an element's chemical properties, and make at atom such as lithium, with an atomic weight of seven, a metal at room temperature, while radon, with an atomic weight of 222, is a gas. Yet, similar families and elements have boiling point differences largely determined by their molecular weights. Within the elemental families and molecular families, such as alcohols, the greater the molecular weight, the higher the melting and boiling point.

A molecule of water has a molecular weight of 18, oxygen weighing 16 (8 protons and 8 neutrons), and the hydrogen two (two atoms of one proton each). Atmospheric oxygen, O₂,has a molecular weight of 32. We see that oxygen boils at -180° C. (-300° F.), but the much lighter water boils at 100° C. (212° F.), at sea level. The reason for that huge difference is that water molecules have much more attraction to each other than oxygen molecules do, because of that hydrogen bonding. Ammonia is another compound with relatively high polarity because of hydrogen bonding. Ammonia is composed of one nitrogen atom (the element next to oxygen on the periodic table, which needs three electrons to complete its shell) and three hydrogen atoms. Ammonia has a molecular weight of 17, less than water. The ammonia molecule's boiling point is -33° C. (-28° F.), far higher than atmospheric nitrogen, with a molecular weight of 28, which boils at -195° C. (-320° F.).

Adding enough heat energy so the molecules vibrate enough to overcome their mutual attraction produces melting and boiling. If the molecules are highly attracted to each other, their boiling point is high. If the molecules are not attracted to each other, their boiling point is low.

Because of ammonia’s low boiling point relative to the environment, and its high latent heat of vaporization, ammonia is the ideal refrigerant…well, not completely ideal. Ammonia is highly poisonous. Early refrigerators used ammonia as the refrigerant, but if the refrigeration lines sprang a leak at night, the entire family could die in their beds.

Early in the 20^th century, an old money empire that supplied virtually all American gunpowder and explosives, almost since the nation was founded, arming America for all of its wars, got into the fast-rising chemicals industry. Du Pont Corporation developed alternatives to ammonia as a refrigerant. The refrigerants went by the trade name Freon, and the most popular, R-12, was made of one carbon atom bonded to two chlorine and two fluorine atoms. Carbon has its eight-electron shell half full, so carbon ideally makes four bonds to other elements. Carbon makes complicated bonds with other atoms. There is an entire branch of chemistry solely devoted to carbon. It is called organic chemistry, because carbon is the basis for life on Earth.

R-12 has a boiling point of -30° C. (-22° F.), low for a molecular weight of 121. Diatomic chlorine has a molecular weight of 71, but a boiling point of -34° C. (-30° F.). The reason for Freon's low boiling point is the molecule's symmetry in shape as well as electric charge. The molecule is not polarized, the inter-molecular attraction is minimal, and therefore relatively less vibration needs to be introduced to cause the molecules to separate.

The other attraction of R-12 and the other Freons was their relative inertness, which ventures into chlorine and fluorine’s great reactivity. Chlorine and fluorine gas never float around in the atmosphere. They are so highly reactive, because of that unfilled electron shell, that they react to almost anything they touch, in search of that electron to fill their shells. Once they get that electron, they never let go, unless they are subjected to tremendous energies rarely found in nature. Most halogens have bonded to metals in the environment, which is where they are found. Sea salt is the classic example of a halogen bonding with a metal, particularly an alkali metal, eager to give up its spare electron. In those halide salts, the compounds are highly polarized because of the highly unequal electron sharing. When such a salt is put into water, the highly polarized water reacts with the highly polarized salt, and the salt dissolves, and creates salt ions in the water.

Carbon is not much of an ionizing element, as it would want to give up half its electron shell to ionize, or take on four more electrons. Carbon usually makes bonds where the electrons are shared, called a covalent bond. The electron bonds in Freon are stable: no atom wants to change the arrangement and react with something else. Because of that inert, stable nature, Freon is generally considered safe for human contact. It will not react with human flesh much, and even when inhaled produces little effect, although some of the less stable Freons can produce anesthetic and psychoactive effects, and can be corrosive.

Those tight bonds and molecular symmetry make Freon useful. Teflon is another fluorocarbon. The stability and “safety” of fluorocarbons ironically are potentially a threat to life on earth. There is theory and evidence that the heavy Freon molecule can float up to the atmosphere's ozone layer, where the sun’s radiation destroys the molecule. The resulting chlorine ions (the fluorine ions do also, although they do not get as much press and are less damaging than chlorine) catalyze the ozone, which is O₃, back to O₂, and destroys the ozone layer, which shields Earth’s surface from ultraviolet solar radiation. That is what made the Freon/ozone controversy, and led to banning long-lasting fluorocarbons.

Fluorine is among the Industrial Revolution's most important chemicals. Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth’s crust and makes up about 8% of it. Iron is second at 5%. Oxygen and silicon are the most abundant crust elements, comprising 47% and 28% respectively. Aluminum was not used in civilization until the late 19^th century, because it was difficult to effectively extract and refine. Even today, most aluminum is not commercially obtainable because it is usually bound up in silicon compounds called silicates. Bauxite, a class of aluminum oxides, is the primary source of aluminum ore. It was not until 1886 that a method was discovered to economically refine aluminum. The process was to dissolve bauxite in cryolite, a ten-atom molecule composed of one aluminum, three sodium, and six fluorine atoms. The mix was then charged with electricity in an electrolysis process, which separated the aluminum. That process is still the main one used today. The process needs electricity, cryolite, and bauxite. When the aluminum is removed, sodium fluoride is the main byproduct, and it is a deadly poison.

This site’s main fluoridation narrative deals with fluoride waste and the real world. It is a terrifying tale of power and greed that continues today, with hundred of millions of victims, including most of the people reading this.

City	Fluoride PPM	% of cavity-free children	% with fluorosis
Pueblo, CO	0.6	37	2.4
Junction City, CO	0.7	26	1.7
East Moline, IL	1.5	11	24.5
Monmouth, IL	1.7	55	42.1
Galesburg, IL	1.8	56	35.1
Colorado Springs, CO	2.5	41	67.6