What’s the Good Doctor to Do?
By Diane Miller JD
February 6, 2025
The Utah state senate delivered a jolt to the dental establishment on February 21 when it strongly passed a bill, HB81, that bans water fluoridation state-wide, sending it on to the governor for his signature. The bill had already passed in the house, and it passed so overwhelmingly in both houses that it seems likely that it could override a governor veto if that were to happen.
At a time where water fluoridation around America is being halted more than it is being increased, several factors have propelled Utah’s legislature to its approval of the path-breaking ban. One is the ruling in Food and Water Watch et al v EPA by a federal district court judge, Edward Chen, that water fluoridation poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s brain health and intelligence and that the plaintiff in the case, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) absolutely must adopt a rule regulating water fluoridation so as to eliminate that risk. Under the Biden administration, the EPA announced that it would appeal that ruling. However, that announcement of an EPA appeal occurred just days before Trump became president and announced that he was appointing Robert F Kennedy Jr, a fluoridation critic, to become Secretary of Health and Human Services. Further the water districts of Utah all testified in favor of the ending of water fluoridation in Utah because the fluoridation product being used – hazardous industrial fluoride wastes from phosphate fertilizer plants – are a hazard to the workers there; and one water facility worker testified that he had suffered lung damage from breathing the fumes.
The disaster in Sandy City
But a fluoride “incident” that occurred in the town of Sandy in 2019 also provided a nightmarish example of how toxic the fluoridation product is and how harmful it can quickly be. On February 6 of 2019 Sandy experienced the most serious fluoride “overfeed” in history. The public officials reacted poorly to the crisis, failing to warn the 600 residents affected for ten days that their water was dangerously unfit to drink or use. A switch in the fluoride feed system got stuck in the open position feeding 14 gallons of the toxic fluoride waste into the system for a few minutes. A warning light also malfunctioned and failed to alert operators. Some of their water samples were tested at 40 times above the allowable federal threshold for fluoride. Due to the corrosiveness of the fluoridation product, large amounts of lead and copper were leached into the tap water of the households from their old plumbing. Senator Kirk Cullimore, chief author of the bill in the senate, knows about what happened in Sandy very well; his senate district includes the town of Sandy. Nineteen-year-old Max Widmeier, from Sandy, came to a senate hearing and explained how the fluoride overfeed incident left him with permanent disabilities. Max was only eleven years old in February 2019 when, for days, he drank that water poisoned from the overfeed. Max told of how the poisoned water caused severe stomach damage, neurological symptoms including blackouts, and many other long-term issues including a continuing intolerance to fluoridated tap water.
Who’s really in favor of freedom?
Unable to reach agreement with the merits of fluoride, the legislature dueled over their differing arguments in favor of freedom; each side claimed to be arguing for the important principle of freedom. Fluoride proponents, opposed to the legislation to ban fluoridation, claimed to be advocates of freedom because a statewide ban would prevent the water districts in cities and counties from being able to decide to fluoridate, thus inhibiting their freedom to do so. The Utah Dental Association, part of the ADA, made that argument. But opponents of water fluoridation, favoring a state-wide ban, argued that fluoridation itself is inherently a violation of health freedom. Fluoridation forces everyone in a water district to drink and use water that has a substance in it that has been added only as a medical/dental treatment, thus coercing an entire population to have that treatment whether it is wanted or not. Fluoridation is, in reality, heavy-handed government authoritarianism.
But could freedom to get fluoride in a prescription drug- supplement be allowed?
Utah has been one of the least heavily fluoridated states and, interestingly, the prescription of fluoride tablets has also been banned there for some time. To soften the resistance to the bill, the authors offered a concession: they would add a section in the bill that would make fluoride supplements legal in Utah so that parents, feeling deprived because of the ending of water fluoridation, could get a prescription for sodium fluoride tablets, giving their children a daily dose of it. A supplement given daily, for example, provides 0.5 mg of fluoride, supposedly about the same as what a child would get in a home that has fluoridated tap water. The strange deal allowed the authors to pass their bill easily, chief author Representative Stephanie Gricius told this writer. The deal is strange because it was a poison banned in the water in exchange for access to another version of that poison allowed by prescription as a “drug.”
Representative
Stephanie Gricius
Is the success of the Utah fluoridation ban
tainted by the deal that was made?
By being the first state to ban water fluoridation state-wide, Utah appears poised to break through a psychological barrier by serving as an example to other states that would now want to similarly ban fluoridation state-wide. Will we see the collapse of the water fluoridation scam this year at last?
As to the nagging issue of fluoride supplements by prescription, education of the public, the concerned parents, could go a long way to offset the pro-fluoride messages of the Utah Dental Association there. After all, back in the 1930’s sodium fluoride was widely marketed as a rat poison and an insecticide – it was a deadly poison, and it worked! It was only in the 1940s that fluoride was (deceptively) re-branded as the answer to children’s tooth decay and needed to be added to the drinking water as a brilliant public health measure. Today’s sugar-coated sodium fluoride tablets contain the same poison used to kill rats back in the 1930s. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), our supposed federal watch dog, knows it! But only very sporadically has the FDA raided a fluoride tablet manufacturer, warning it that it is manufacturing and selling a mineral drug supplement that has not been FDA approved as being safe and effective for the claimed purpose of preventing child tooth decay. Now, in 2025, under new, less corruptible leadership, the FDA could well crack down on every company selling such poison pills marketed with bogus claims. FDA should not be content with raiding and warning just one company, sporadically. A tough, firm crackdown on the manufacturing and selling of such toxic, unapproved fluoride products would take care of the issue for Utah and every other state.
