Fluoride Part 1: Prehistory

Fluorine is a chemical element. It’s not just any chemical element, but it’s in the running for the most violently reactive chemical element; at the very least, it’s the most reactive element out of all the non-metals. Geologists make use of its extreme chemical properties: Zircon crystals are usually used for radiometric dating¹ because they’re so hard that any atoms in them have probably been in those crystals from their beginning. Geologists want to get at those atoms for the purpose of radiometric dating, but they run into a problem: How does one extract the lead and uranium impurities from a mineral that’s so hard? The answer, of course, is by dissolving the crystals in hydrofluoric acid. But while the element does have applications in science, the majority of its use is concentrated in industrial applications: It’s used in the smelting of steel, iron, beryllium, magnesium, lead, aluminum, copper, gold, silver, and nickel. It’s also a byproduct of mining phosphate for the production of artificial fertilizer. Much of industry depends on the use of fluoride chemicals and the production of fluoride byproducts, and it’s been that way for over a century—and it’s impossible to understand why water fluoridation is currently pushed by some governments without understanding the element’s vital role in industry.

Unfortunately, the same violent reactivity that makes the element so useful also makes it a pretty dangerous pollutant. Fluorine is the strongest oxidizing agent there is. The carbon-fluorine chemical bond is the strongest in all of organic chemistry—which is certainly relevant for living creatures². Hydrofluoric acid is one of the only acids that can’t be stored in glass containers, since it’s one of the few acids that eats glass and other silicate material, and so fluoride pollution hanging in the air can actually etch glass windows. In his 1937 book Fluorine Intoxication, an important Danish researcher named Kaj Roholm described the miasma that would form around factories that used fluoride in their operations:

In the course of time injuries to plants have been observed round about various factories, and these have been traced to a fluorine content in the waste gases from these places. Where a factory’s raw materials contain fluorine, the smoke gas may under certain circumstances contain hydrogen fluoride (HF); if silicates or quartz are present as well, which very often is the case in practice, silicon tetrafluoride (SiF₄) may also be given off. With the humidity of the atmosphere there is a partial hydrolysis of SiF₄ to hydrofluorosilicic acid³ (H₂SiF₆). Consequently, the active compounds are hydrofluoric acid and hydrofluorosilicic acid in finely atomized form with a large surface. Their ability to form fog is shared with sulphuric acid and hydrochloric acid, but their toxicity is much greater. The heavy fogs are slow to dispense and therefore may do great damage under circumstances where it is difficult to renew the air.

When hydrofluoric acid eats glass or other silicate material, it becomes hydrofluorosilicic acid, which happens to be an even stronger acid than hydrofluoric acid. Therefore if a person tries storing hydrofluoric acid in a glass container, it will eat through its container, and in doing so become an even stronger acid than it was before. It was these acids hanging in the air around the various smelting factories.

On the topic of hydrofluoric acid, the chemical company Yuhan Technology states on its website:

Imagine a chemical so powerful it can dissolve glass, yet so insidious it can penetrate human skin without immediate warning, causing delayed but agonizing and potentially fatal systemic damage. This describes Hydrofluoric Acid (HF). While it serves as a cornerstone in countless modern industrial processes, its extreme corrosivity and unique toxicity demand an unparalleled level of vigilance in its handling and, most critically, its storage.

With respect to its storage, Yuhan Technology goes on to emphasize: “NEVER USE GLASS. This cannot be stressed enough. HF will rapidly dissolve glass, leading to immediate release and catastrophic exposure.” Even metal containers don’t last long when storing the acid, due to the its extreme corrosiveness. (Moreover, when the fluoride part of hydrofluoric acid reacts with metals, the extremely flammable hydrogen part is released in the form of a gas, which, when mixed with the oxygen in the air, can even result in fiery explosions.) Because there are so many different things that fluorine reacts violently with, Yuhan Technology especially recommends using fluorine chemicals to contain hydrofluoric acid: Because the carbon-fluoride bond is so strong, polymers that are made of carbon and fluorine can form very stable chemicals that are some of the only substances resistant to fluoride corrosion. Teflon is an example of such a fluoropolymer, also known as a fluorinated plastic, that can be used to contain hydrofluoric acid⁴. Yuhan Technology also says that secondary containment of hydrofluoric acid is “mandatory,” just in case of unanticipated leaks or spills, and they recommend having an emergency preparedness plan—which is to say that containment failures could easily mature into emergencies. The places where hydrofluoric acid is stored, they say, must be off-limits except to authorized personnel, and such places should be labelled as follows: “DANGER: HYDROFLUORIC ACID – SEVERE POISON – CORROSIVE.”

It’s not hard to see why this chemical, along with hydrofluorosilicic acid, would be such nasty pollutants given that fluoride is so reactive and that certain industries are economically dependent on producing lots of them. Of the applications already mentioned, the most economically important in terms of fluoride are the production of aluminum, steel, and phosphate fertilizer.

But more important than its effects on glass are its effects on living creatures. Factories would exude poisonous fluoride gases causing damage to all nearby humans, livestock, wild animals, and vegetation. Disease would usually strike within a radius of a few miles and it would depend on the direction of the wind and how active the factory was. Whether by drinking contaminated water or by consuming vegetation laced with the poison, cattle would exhibit all manner of horrific bone diseases. They would have difficulty moving and would limp. They would exhibit strange postures as the spinal column fused into a single bone. As fluoride would deposit itself in the bones and cause them to thicken, the joints would swell up and become inflamed. The beasts would stiffen up while at the same time their muscle would waste away.

The medical writer Joel Griffiths gave a description of the pollutant’s effect on livestock:

Cows crawled around the pasteur on their bellies, inching along like giant snails. So crippled by bone disease they could not stand up, this was the only way they could graze. Some died kneeling, after giving birth to stunted calves. Others kept on crawling until, no longer able to chew because their teeth had crumbled down to the nerves, they began to starve....

Such bone diseases were not just a plague on the surrounding countryside, but most of all for the workers who had the displeasure of being exposed to the element. Cryolite was the miracle rock that contained enough fluoride to smelt all kinds of metals for the increasingly industrial economy of the early twentieth century⁵. Cryolite is transparent and either whitish, reddish, or blackish in color, but it often has an appearance very similar to ice—from which it gets its name, which is basically Greek for “ice stone.”⁶ It forms cubic crystals, and its brittleness gives it the tendency to form dust. Those laborers who worked with this rock exhibited the same diseases that neighboring livestock did, mostly skeletal abnormalities. Over long periods of time, bones would thicken and fuse together. Arthritis has also been a common side effect in those with chronic exposure, especially workers and those living around the factories. Inflicted in acute doses, fluoride could cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Breathing in high enough doses could result in hemorrhaged lungs and death, as was the case in 1930 in the Meuse Valley in Belgium, where 63 workers were killed by the spiteful gases that escaped from being imprisoned in cryolite.

With its amazing ability to kill, it’s not hard to see why fluoride compounds were (and continue to be) employed as pesticides. Kaj Roholm recorded the history of the practice:

The high toxicity of fluorine compounds has led to their application as a rat and mouse poison. In most cases they are used in the form of sodium fluoride or sodium fluosilicate, which are effective, relatively cheap, and have no pronounced taste. They are sold on the market under proprietary names and seem to have been used for this purpose for the first time in Germany after the war [i.e. World War I]. Their use against noxious insects dates from the last century. The first case of poisoning with one of these preparations was in 1899. Judging from the many patent-preparations and the number of poisoning accidents, their use is widespread. Sodium fluoride and sodium fluosilicate are used especially as powders for cockroaches etc. Sodium fluoride has also been employed with good effect against animal parasites like vermin on poultry, in solution or as dusting-powder. In particular, these preparations occasion acute intoxications of man and animals through their being confused with something else.

Although fluoride-based pesticides existed as far back as the late nineteenth century, the more popular pesticides at the time were based on arsenic (more on the health effects of that another time). Cryolite dust itself has been employed as a pesticide, but it was in the 1930s that fluoride pesticides, including fluoroalcohols and fluorophosphates, really took off. The well-known pesticide DDT is based on chlorine rather than fluorine, but there was actually a fluorine-based variant of DDT known either as fluoro-DDT or DFDT and which was sold under the name “Gix.” More recently, new kinds of fluoride-based pesticides are being used. When soluble forms of fluoride pesticides were used, they had a nasty habit of inflicting chemical burns on plants.

Extremely corrosive and poisonous to all forms of life, it’s really no wonder that there was a point in time that damage claims due to fluoride pollution were greater than those of the next twenty pollutants combined. This was the most expensive pollutant of the twentieth century.

It was toxic waste that industry didn’t know what to do with. Lawsuits were piling up. Everyone knew that the epidemics were the result of the industrialists dumping large amounts of their toxic byproduct into the air, rivers, and bodies of water. And the more research came out, the worse fluoride looked. Beyond causing things like crippling bone disease, there was also the impact of fluoride on teeth. In 1925, Elmer V. McCollum, a researcher who has previously been mentioned for his rodent research regarding the effect of seed oils on the health of rats, also performed experiments on rats involving fluoridation. In the words of him and his colleagues,

Since all investigators who have examined the teeth and bones for fluoride have found considerable amounts of this element, we were led to consider whether perhaps a deficiency of fluorine in the food might lead to the formation of teeth which had poor structure, and consequently possess little power to resist the agencies which lead to decay.

So McCollum and his colleagues went into their experiment imagining that fluoride might be something like an essential nutrient for tooth and bone health. McCollum had previously claimed to find components of foods that were essential for life, which have subsequently been given the name “vitamins,” and it was natural that McCollum might expect something similar to happen with this chemical element that gets stored in the bones: Maybe fluorine was something like an essential nutrient. He and his team set up their experiment in a controlled manner so that one group of rats would be given a diet, and another group of rats would be given a diet that is completely identical except that it had a very small amount of sodium fluoride added to it. This way, any difference between the groups would be attributable to the added sodium fluoride. After performing their rodent experiments, McCollum et al. nevertheless reported that,

The results showed, contrary to our expectations, that the ingestion of fluorine, in amounts but little above those which have been reported to occur in natural foods, markedly disturbs the structure of the teeth.

Those fed the diet artificially high in fluoride had teeth that were “abnormal in color” and which would “grow into abnormal positions.” McCollum et al. also noted that, “The animals fed the added fluorine were slightly stunted in that they never grew so large as the controls, and they were shorter and more stocky.” They went on to say that the rats not given fluoride “had excellent teeth.”

It wasn’t long after McCollum’s unexpected discovery concerning the impact of fluoride on rodent teeth that the same dental connection was made in humans. In certain places where the water had naturally high fluoride levels, tooth deformities were common. This tooth deformity was characterized by the teeth being covered by irregular white spots, and, in more severe cases, brown spots as well. This condition is often described as having “mottling” on the teeth or being “mottled teeth.” In the nineteenth century, this tooth condition affected many Americans settling westward since the groundwater in a lot of western North America has naturally high levels of fluoride. In those times, the condition was called “Colorado brown stain” or “Texas teeth.” But in 1931, multiple researchers, including H.V. Churchill⁷, made the epidemiological connection between chronic fluoride exposure and mottled teeth, corroborating the experimental work in rodents performed by McCollum. Experimental evidence in animals was pointing to the same conclusion that epidemiological research pointed to in humans. Because the condition was known to be caused by fluoride exposure, the condition came to be known as dental fluorosis, which is what it’s still called to this day. So as early as 1931, fluoride was known to cause brittle, discolored teeth.

Two years later, in 1933, Floyd DeEds, a senior toxicologist of the US Department of Agriculture, published a lengthy report titled Chronic Fluorine Exposure – A Review. DeEds also gave a brief history of the dental studies on fluoride up to that time, pointing to the work of both McCollum and Churchill in implicating fluoride in tooth damage, as well as other experimental evidence showing that fluoride had the same effects on dogs that it did on rats and humans: The teeth were brittle and discolored. DeEds also pointed out that a similar condition to dental fluorosis could be induced by calcium deficiency, and that there could be a complex interaction between calcium intake and fluoride intake:

On the basis of the chemical characteristics of fluorine, and because of the relatively easy penetrability of all membranes to fluorine in the form of the monovalent anion, it might have been predicted that fluorine would be toxic due to the formation of insoluble calcium fluoride. A disturbance of calcium metabolism might have been expected.

DeEds also said,

In other words, abnormal teeth may be the result of a relatively high fluorine intake on a normal intake of calcium, or they may occur after a low calcium content of the diet when the fluorine content averages normal.

The first topic covered in the review was actually acute fluoride toxicity. He noted that amounts of sodium fluoride greater than 0.016 grams were known to cause nausea and that 0.195 grams would cause death within a few hours. Symptoms of acute sodium fluoride poisoning listed by DeEds included stupor and weakness, convulsions of “an epileptic character,” accelerated breathing followed by paralysis, vomiting, salivation, and “premature rigor mortis.”⁸

He also pointed out other interesting diseases resulting from chronic fluoride exposure. For example, there was its effect in suppressing the estrous cycle in females, and thereby causing a decrease reproduction. It was also reported how animals could reliably be given goiters and other thyroid abnormalities when given excessive amounts of sodium fluoride in an experimental setting⁹. Moreover, given to an animal, he reported that sodium fluoride could cause “a disturbance of blood sugar.” In particular, it was able to induce high blood sugar, which could implicate fluoride in the etiology of diabetes, and possibly even heart disease due to its connection to diabetes and calcium metabolism.

According to the investigative reporter Christopher Bryson,

This new dental information appears to have rung an alarm bell for industry. Quietly Alcoa scientists made their own investigations. It was not just nature’s fluoride that stained teeth, they discovered; the company found tooth mottling in children living near Alcoa’s big aluminum plant in Massena, New York. Crucially, however, Alcoa’s chemists reported that there was no naturally occuring fluoride in the local water. A potential source of the fluoride staining children’s teeth in Massena was obvious: there was little or no pollution control on many early aluminum plants, and elsewhere around the country the fluoride waste from these industries was routinely dumped in nearby rivers.

In light of the evidence that fluoride was harmful for teeth, without the benefit of hindsight, it would have been impossible to guess Alcoa’s next move. According to Bryson,

Alcoa’s research director, Francis Frary, took action. In September 1935 he approached Gerald Cox, a Mellon Institute researcher, at the American Chemical Society’s Pittsburgh meeting. Frary now had a suggestion that would ultimately transform the public perception of fluoride. Though Frary was preoccupied with the “killing” hazards facing his Alcoa employees, and the aluminum industry faced lawsuits from the farmers whose cattle had been injured in the vicinity of the smelters, Frary took it upon himself to make a generous suggestion to the Mellon researcher. Had Cox ever considered that good teeth might be caused by fluoride?

By that point, the Mellon Institute had already been dipping its toes into scientific fraud. The Johns-Manville company was the world’s leading manufacturer of asbestos products, and its workers were suffering from lung injuries. Justinian C. Lane is a personal injury lawyer who specializes in injuries resulting from exposure to asbestos. In his five part series titled Asbestos 101, particularly in Part 4, Lane meticulously documents the history of the asbestos conspiracy, including how the Mellon Institute was commissioned by Edward Ray Weidlein¹⁰ in early 1935 on behalf of Johns-Manville and other companies in the industry to “study” the effects of asbestos dust, in exchange for an enormous donation to the institute. Of course, in this context, the verb “study” means to engage in a PR campaign to convince everyone that asbestos is safe—even though it obviously wasn’t. In more blunt language, the “donation” was a bribe. Quid pro quo.

Lane points out how the strategy of paying the Mellon Institute to carry out “research” accomplished multiple goals, but foremost was the perception that independent science was on the side of industry. If a person was injured by asbestos and brought his employer to court, and if the employer furnished the court with asbestos safety studies of the employer’s own design, the jury would never believe those studies. The employer would have an obvious conflict of interest when it comes to reporting accurately on the safety of asbestos, and the jury would recognize that. But by funding “research” at the Mellon Institute, and pointing to that institute’s “research” as though the Mellon Institute were a truly independent third party, those in the asbestos industry would have a seemingly much stronger case in court. The jury would never have to know that those very “studies” they learned about in the courtroom were commissioned by the defendant to say just exactly what those “studies” ended up saying. This shady tactic allowed the Johns-Manville company and many others to persuade juries about the mythical safety of asbestos and other hazardous dusts including both silica dust and coal dust. So it’s because of the Mellon Institute that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of being exposed to the extremely sharp mineral fibers we call asbestos. As so often is the case, all the people who loved putting faith in the “experts” were made into fools only a short while later, and the skeptics were right all along.

So the Mellon Institute scientists were scientific prostitutes, selling their respectability to the highest bidder the same way any ordinary streetwalker would. And if we can’t trust that shameless institution to tell us whether asbestos is safe, then it obviously wouldn’t make any sense at all to trust them to tell us whether fluoride is safe. Nevertheless, that’s what people have been doing for almost a century. In the words of the great polymath Murray Rothbard,

[T]he Mellon Institute, ALCOA’s research lab in Pittsburgh, sponsored a study in which biochemist Gerald J. Cox fluoridated some lab rats, decided that cavities in those rats had been reduced, and immediately concluded that “the case [that fluoride reduces cavities] should be regarded as proved.”

This is the origin story for the commonly held belief that fluoride is beneficial for dental health by reducing cavities: It began as a marketing spin to save industry’s tail; it was marketing masquerading as science.

The very same year that the industrial metals sector began propagandizing in favor of their toxic waste, Kaj Roholm published his previously mentioned treatise on fluoride, building on the work of DeEds. The main body of the book was about 320 pages, but it included an additional 100 pages of bibliography. It was titled Fluorine Intoxication and it came to some pretty harsh conclusions about the substance. Roholm found that 80.9 percent of cryolite workers experienced gastric symptoms, 33.8 percent experienced intestinal symptoms, 51.5 percent had circulatory or respiratory symptoms (including colds), 35.3 percent had symptoms pertaining to bones, joints, and muscles, 22.1 percent experienced symptoms pertaining to the nervous system, and 11.8 experienced skin rashes. Now this information pertaining to workers is epidemiological data rather than experimental data, and we can’t immediately say which of these might be caused by their toxic employment and which of these might be caused by other lifestyle factors, but Roholm’s book also contained many findings from animal experiments. Roholm also noted the negative impact that fluorine had on teeth, saying,

In regions where the fluorine content of drinking water is 1 mg. per litre [i.e. 1 part per million (ppm)] or more, the specific changes in the teeth, mottled teeth, may be expected in individuals drinking this water during the period when the permanent teeth calcify.

Roholm also said,

Our present knowledge most decidedly indicates that fluorine is not necessary to the quality of that tissue [i.e. the enamel], but that on the contrary the enamel organ is electively sensitive to the deleterious effects of fluorine.

A shady alliance between industry and dentistry soon formed. General Motors had recently invented Freon, a fluoride-based refrigerant¹¹. A major manufacturing facility was built in New Jersey to produce Freon, jointly established by General Motors and DuPont, and the General Motors scientists noticed that these workers had elevated levels of fluoride in their blood. It was in an attempt to downplay the risks of fluoride and promote its mythical benefits that General Motors made a donation of $25,000, a large sum of money at the time, to the American Dental Association. The American Dental Association understood that they were to promote the idea that ingested fluoride would be deposited in the teeth to make them stronger. Another bribe.

With the seed having been planted that fluoride compounds could protect teeth instead of damage them, and with the American Dental Association on board, the possibility arose for a radical new suggestion to be made in September of 1939. “The world,” said Bryson,

stood on the precipice of another world war. German tanks had just entered Poland. Aluminum aircraft and steel armor plate would be critical in the coming conflict. Pittsburgh’s great blast furnaces and aluminum pot lines, grown cold during the Depression, were being stoked anew, throwing a fresh funereal smoke against the autumn sky. Workers were already flooding war factories, eager for work. Cox proposed that America should now consider adding fluoride to the public water supply.

The production of the necessary aluminum and steel would obviously come with large amounts of fluoride byproducts. Now industry needed an excuse for the government to be buying up large amounts of their toxic waste, and the fluoridation of government water was just the solution. In the words of Rothbard,

During World War II, damage claims for fluoride emissions piled up as expected, in proportion to the great expansion of aluminum production during the war. But attention from these claims was diverted when, just before the end of the war, the [Public Health Service] began to push hard for compulsory fluoridation of water. Thus the drive for compulsory fluoridation of water accomplished two goals in one shot: It transformed the image of fluoride from a curse to a blessing that will strengthen every kid’s teeth, and it provided a steady and substantial monetary demand for fluorides to dump annually into the nation’s water.

Lawyers from Alcoa, US Steel, Kaiser Aluminum and Steel, Reynolds Metals Company, Monsanto Chemical, and others joined together to form the Fluorine Lawyers Committee. This committee funded more “research” at Kettering Laboratory.

Robert Kehoe was the main villain at Kettering Laboratory. Considered by colleagues to be “arrogant and aloof,” Kehoe was also involved with the peer review process. Exerting influence on medicine by sitting on the editorial boards of major scientific publications, he could block papers from being published if he didn’t like them¹². Nowadays, Kehoe’s work defending the safety of fluoride is overshadowed by the fact that he was the industry’s darling when it came to leaded gasoline: Despite evidence that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline was causing widespread chronic lead poisoning, Kehoe ardently defended leaded gasoline up to his retirement. But since leaded fuel is (largely) a thing of the past, his modern legacy is the research conducted on the safety of fluoride. But the reader is invited to ask himself the following question: Should anyone trust a person who recommends leaded gasoline to tell him that fluoride is safe? Because that’s effectively what most people have been doing for decades.

One 1951 study to come out of the Kettering Laboratory was authored by, among others, Edward Largent, who personally considered it “dishonest” that victims would want compensation for damages caused by fluoride poisoning. In fact, this “study” was an attack on the previously mentioned Kaj Roholm, calling the Danish researcher out by name. Largent had to do this since it was understood that the non-toxicity of fluoride could only be sold to the public if the special interest groups first discredited the man who wrote the book on fluoride intoxication.

Bryson wrote,

Largent’s 1951 paper was influential among those for whom it was meant to be influential, so that in 1965, for example, the nation’s leading fluoride expert, Harold Hodge¹³, could state that “crippling fluorosis has never been seen in the United States.” But Largent’s paper also appears to have been a grim scientific hoax. At the end of his paper the Kettering researcher had ostentaciously posed a question: why did fluoride appear to affect American and European workers differently? “Just why disability has not been recorded in American workers remains unanswered,” Largent wrote.

The answer is simple. The facts were hidden by a Kettering cover-up that misled a generation of medical researchers about the consequences of industrial fluoride exposure and sentenced many thousands of U.S. workers to undiagnosed fluoride injury. Just three years earlier Kettering’s Robert Kehoe had privately told Alcoa that 120 workers at its Massena aluminum smelting plant had “bone fluorosis” and that 33 were “severe” cases that showed “evidences of disability ranging in estimated degree up to 100 percent.” Similarly, while Largent publicly reported no fluoride disability, privately three doctors had told him that workers’ X-rays showed evidence of fluoride-linked medical injury, according to his personal correspondence and long-concealed records.

The “researchers” were simply liars. They knew they were lying, and they knew that their lies would cause suffering for the fluoride victims. They didn’t pursue Truth; money was their master.

But it wasn’t just these more mundane products like aluminum and steel that fluoride was used to make; it was also necessary for obtaining uranium in a usable form. The reader might be surprised to learn that Christopher Bryson’s excellent book, The Fluoride Deception, dedicates multiple chapters to the Manhattan Project. In the process used by the US Military to enrich uranium, fluoride chemistry had to be employed. This resulted in the US Military studying the effects of fluoride toxicity by accident: Nameless workers would be injured or even killed, and their bodies and organs would be harvested by the government to be studied. Bryson’s book details multiple accidents in which workers were exposed to fluoride chemicals, often because of leaks or violent explosions, with many workers being either killed or left permanently damaged. These explosions weren’t nuclear explosions resulting from enriched uranium, but chemical explosions resulting from the most violently reactive nonmetal of all: fluorine. In fact, multiple news stories about poisonings and explosions had to be forcibly suppressed (even involving government agents stealing from hospitals the organs of deceased victims) so that the government could keep the Manhattan Project a secret. Some workers would be exposed to poisonous gases like uranium hexafluoride and uranium oxyfluoride for eight hours every working day, as measures weren’t taken to ensure that these poisonous gases wouldn’t escape. And not only were workers exposed to viciously poisonous gases, but since the technique of using fluoride to enrich uranium was a government secret, the workers weren’t even allowed to know how dangerous the work they were doing was, lest they accidentally mention that they’re working with fluoride. Word couldn’t get out that fluoride was the secret ingredient necessary for enriching uranium, and so they were simply poisoned without their knowing. Some of the stories are the stuff of horror, such as when Gloria Porter, who was only 22-years-old at the time, watched her co-workers get eaten alive by a cloud of hydrofluoric acid in the immediate aftermath of a chemical explosion. Jack Hein, a researcher whose career included work on fluoride at the University of Rochester in the 1950s and ’60s as well as later work that would be funded by Colgate, said, “People working in the atomic energy production plants were going to be chronically exposed. We didn’t know too much about the toxicity of fluoride, other than the early studies saying a little too much in the water causes damage to teeth.”

After the war, there was a lawsuit brought forward by thirteen farmers whose lands and produce had been damaged by the nearby DuPont plant producing toxic chemicals for the Manhattan Project. Damages existed in a six mile radius centered on the DuPont facility. “Fields were sometimes strewn with dead cattle, residents recalled, while workers who ate the produce they had picked vomited all night and into the next day. ... Some cows were so crippled that they could not stand up, and grazed by crawling on their bellies.” Notably, there were so many peach trees that had received chemical burns in 1944 that the farmers involved in the lawsuit were frequently referred to as peach farmers in government documents. These farmers sued DuPont and the Manhattan Project for $430,000 in damages. Government agents (allegedly “public servants”) secretly labeled the peach farmers (who were obviously members of the public) as enemies of the federal government. As Bryson relates,

Why was there such a national-security emergency over a few lawsuits by New Jersey farmers? In 1946 the United States began full-scale production of atomic bombs. No other nation had yet tested a nuclear weapon, and the A-bomb was seen as crucial for U.S. leadership in the postwar world. The New Jersey fluoride lawsuits were a serious roadblock to that strategy. In the case of fluoride, “If the farmers won, it would open the door to further suits, which might impede the bomb program’s ability to use fluoride,” remarked Jacquelin Kittrell, a Tennessee public-interest lawyer specializing in nuclear cases, who examined the declassified fluoride documents. (Kittrell has represented plaintiffs in several human radiation experiments cases.) She added, “The reports of human injury were especially threatening, because of the potential for enormous settlements—not to mention the PR problem.”

Indeed, DuPont was particularly concerned about the “possible psychologic reaction” to the New Jersey pollution incident, according to a secret 1946 Manhattan Project memo. Facing a threat from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to embargo the region’s produce because of “high fluoride content,” DuPont dispatched its lawyers to the FDA offices in Washington, where an agitated meeting ensued. According to a memo sent the following day to General Groves [who was in charge of the Manhattan Project], DuPont’s lawyer argued “that in view of the pending suits ... any action by the Food and Drug Administration ... would have a serious effect on the DuPont Company and would create a bad public relations situation.”

Because the amount of fluorides that DuPont had been dumping into the atmosphere (i.e. between 30 and 165 thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid each month) was considered a matter of so-called “national security,” the key information that could have won the farmers the case remained classified, and the settlements made were just pennies on the dollar of what had rightly been owed to them.

When one goes looking for evidence that fluoride is good for teeth, one will invariably run into a well-known trial called the Newburgh-Kingston Caries Fluorine Study, also known as the Newburgh-Kingston Fluoride-Caries Trial. In 1945, Newburgh, New York became the second town with intentionally fluoridated water in the United States (after Grand Rapids, Michigan which was first) and, for the purposes of the trial, nearby Kingston, New York was supposed to serve as a control. The chemical added to their water was sodium fluoride¹⁴. The trial was meant to seem like an experiment on teeth, as the name would suggest, but the superficial optics of a dental experiment was really a front for the more nefarious happenings behind the scenes: As declassified documents reveal, the experiment was to monitor whether fluoride exposure would cause non-dental health problems. It was a human experiment to see if fluoridated water – which was already known to be poisonous – could be tolerated.

And there was a reason the trial began in 1945: President Roosevelt would have had the secret human toxicology experiment started in 1943 if not for the National Institutes of Health advising to wait until after the war. It had been judged by the National Institutes of Health that it wouldn’t be wise to study the potentially toxic effects of fluorides until after the war, since their discoveries might only lead to “undue interruption.”¹⁵

So to be clear: The study that everyone points to to indicate the safety and efficacy of water fluoridation was actually secretly a fluoride toxicology study carried out by the Manhattan Project (which was renamed the Atomic Energy Commission after the war) and this institution certainly couldn’t be called an uninterested party. A committee was put together to guide the New York Health Department in performing the large-scale human experiment, and the chairman of that committee was Harold Hodge, a biochemist from the University of Rochester. Bryson writes,

Secretly, in tandem with the state’s public investigation, Hodge’s classified “Program F” at the University of Rochester conducted its own studies, measuring how much fluoride Newburgh citizens retained in their blood and tissues—key information sought by the atomic bomb program.

Investigative journalists discovered that Hodge was quite the heartless fiend when it came to performing medical experiments on unsuspecting victims. He conducted secret studies at both the University of Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital and at Massachusetts General Hospital in which hospital patients were injected with plutonium and uranium without their knowledge in an attempt to find out how much it would take to injure a person. In the 1990s, the federal government had to pay out big money to the families of the victims of the plutonium experiments. The goal of Hodge’s uranium experiments was to see how much uranium it would take to cause injury, but similar experiments were also conducted on vulnerable people to see how much fluoride a person could excrete if he had damaged kidneys. And, believe it or not, Hodge also worked for Project MKUltra, a CIA program dedicated to finding mind-control substances. He tested fluoride compounds for potential mind-control properties, but apparently they worked better as killing agents than as mind-control ones, so he moved onto other substances, such as LSD, which he figured out how to radioactively tag for the CIA’s psychological experiments. But it’s really not at all surprising that they had to move on from fluoride compounds given fluoride’s acute toxicity.

Because the bizarre experiments conducted involving fluoride, uranium, and plutonium were not at all a good look for the government, and because the findings concerning fluoride could be used against the government if released, the secrets were simply kept—just as they’d been kept from the peach farmers. The Atomic Energy Commission’s medical advisor wrote a memo in 1947 which stated,

If specific locations or activities of the Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors are closely associated with statements and information which would invite or tend to encourage claims against the Atomic Energy Commission or its contractor such portions of articles to be published should be reworded or deleted.

This was the confession that the government agency did not see themselves as servants of the public; rather, the public was a kind of obstacle that might get in the way of their plans—plans which had nothing to do with the will of the people. If their actions damaged the health of the people they were ostensibly serving, they would do everything to deny harm and avoid being brought to justice. This note by the Atomic Energy Commission was uncovered by Dan Guttman, who was given the order from then-president Bill Clinton to investigate the human experiments that the US government conducted during the cold war, but to his surprise the University of Rochester and the Pentagon were completely obtuse and said that the documents he was looking for had been shredded. It’s clear that the government was intentionally hiding damning information about fluoride toxicity—why else would they shred that information? Why would they destroy the evidence that would be capable of showing their innocence? If it turned out that fluoride wasn’t dangerous, wouldn’t they just keep the files indefinitely? The only question is just how toxic they discovered the substance to be.

This 1947 memo also explains the evidence that there was a military cover-up: One 1948 paper, namely Dental Conditions in Workers Chronically Exposed to Dilute and Anhydrous Hydrofluoric Acid, had a secret version for circulation within the military and a public version that could be published in a scientific journal. The secret version came to the conclusion that fluoride was actually eating away at people’s teeth, while the version that was allowed to be released to the public came to the opposite conclusion, claiming that the expected erosion and demineralization of teeth were not seen. This was simply a lie to protect the relevant special interest groups, including the Atomic Energy Commission. The public wasn’t supposed to know that they were being poisoned by an alliance of industry and government. Phyllis Mullenix, a very important researcher in the history of fluoride toxicology who will be introduced in Fluoride Part 2, upon finding that this study had a secret version and a public version, wondered if all of the public fluoride research might have been like that—with a secret version for the political class and a fictional substitute released publicly to pacify to the uninitiated masses. Every peer reviewed study published in favor of fluoride is therefore called into doubt because the military was willing to force papers to be rewritten, even so as to say the opposite of what the findings really were, in order to protect the image of that poisonous substance. This obviously means that the Newburgh-Kingston Fluoride-Caries Trial simply can’t be trusted to any extent.

So when the Atomic Energy Commission research indicated that it was safe to be adding fluoride to water – even if they had to lie about it – this let the government off the hook for the human rights violations they’d committed, and it helped the government’s friends in industry as well. People injured on the job by exposure to extreme poisons would be unable to sue for damages and be made whole, since these special interests could just point to Hodge’s Newburgh-Kingston Caries Fluorine Study that had been funded specifically for this purpose. The substance was safe, and furthermore it was even good for teeth. Maybe we should even be thanking the polluters for saving us money at the dentist. Dentistry was forever changed as a result of the work that Hodge oversaw.

There were other distortions of the Truth that the reader can find if he chooses to read Bryson’s very thorough book. The reader is highly encouraged to find, buy, and read Bryson’s book, because it goes into far greater depth about the fraud committed at Kettering, as well as numerous other topics related to fluoride that we won’t get into here, such as the disaster at Donora. So much of the history of fluoride is only known because of Bryson’s investigations, and he had important interviews with key figures who are no longer alive to be interviewed, so his book is really the definitive history of the subject.

The point is that this was absolutely not an honest operation going on. The backstory to water fluoridation wasn’t one of disinterested scientists performing experiments in pursuit of Truth, but rather a tale of criminals intentionally trying to cover their tracks—and it was that way from the start. The push for fluoride began with the very same criminals who propagandized in favor of the safety of asbestos, coal dust, Freon, and leaded gasoline, and it ended with the parasite that is the military-industrial complex. The corporate and governmental special interest groups wanted fluoride to be safe, and they were willing to lie in scientific journals to avoid paying out damages to their victims. At every turn and for almost a century, the evidence that this is a hazardous chemical has been ignored because it’s inconvenient to those special interests.

Anyway, without this colossal effort to change the public perception of fluoride, water fluoridation would never have been possible. But with this background out of the way, it’s time to turn to the era of water fluoridation in Part 2.