Propaganda and the History of Fluoridation

Excert taken from Dylana Accolla's original 2003 article "Rethinking Fluridation" in Chronogram Magazine.

The story of how fluoride went from being an industrial pollutant to a public health asset is told in a 1992 article by investigative reporter Joel Griffiths, “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy” (Covert Action Quarterly, No. 42). As early as 1850, fluoride emissions from iron and copper industries were poisoning livestock, crops, and people. By the turn of the century, lawsuits and heavy regulations threatened to put an end to those industries in Germany and England. The invention of the tall smokestack saved those industries by dispersing fluorides and other toxins into the upper air, so less of it would directly effect living creatures below. But when industrial expansion in the 1920s sent fluoride emissions spiraling out of control, not even tall smokestacks could screen the damaging effects. In 1933, the world’s first major air pollution disaster, in the Meuse Valley, Belgium, in which several thousand people became violently ill and died, involved fluoride poisoning.

Some of the biggest polluters were the aluminum industry and the fluorocarbon chemicals industry, which manufactures aerosols and refrigerants. By 1938, on wartime production schedule, the aluminum industry was producing an unprecedented amount of fluoride waste.
Realizing that industrial growth depended on the necessity of releasing millions of tons of waste fluoride into the environment, American and European industrialists and governments initiated studies on the toxicity of fluoride. In 1931, the Public Health Service, under the leadership of Andrew W. Mellon, us Treasury Secretary and a founder and major stockholder of the Aluminum Company of America (alcoa), sent a dentist named Trendley Dean to several remote Western towns where drinking water contained high concentrations of natural fluoride from deep in the earth’s crust. “Dean’s mission,” explains Griffiths, “was to determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without obvious damage to their teeth.” Writes Griffiths, “Dean found that teeth in these high-fluoride towns were often discolored and eroded, but he also reported that they appeared to have fewer cavities than average.

He cautiously recommended further studies to determine whether a lower level of fluoride in drinking water might reduce cavities without simultaneously damaging bones and teeth, where fluoride settles in humans and other animals.”

In response to Dean’s report, Gerald J. Cox, an alcoa industrial lab biochemist, immediately began a study fluoridating lab rats. He found that fluoride reduced their cavities, proclaiming that “the case should be regarded as proved.” (G.J. Cox, “Discussion,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol.113, 1938, p. 1753). The next year, Cox announced that “the present trend toward complete removal of fluoride from water and food may need some reversal” (Journal of American Water Works Association. Vol, 31:1926–30, 1939). And in 1939 the first proposal that the us should fluoridate its drinking water was made—“not by a doctor, or dentist,” notes Griffiths, “but by Cox, an industry scientist working for a company threatened by fluoride damage claims.” Subsequently, Cox toured the country campaigning for fluoride.
Cox got help from Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who pioneered the application of Freud’s psychological theories to advertising and government propaganda. “If you can influence the [group’s] leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation,” wrote Bernays in his 1928 book Propaganda, “you automatically influence the group which they sway.” The main targets of Bernays advertising blitz were doctors and dentists. Under Bernays’ media tactics, a quick shift in peoples’ perception of fluoride began to take place. (Emphasis ours)

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