Does anybody know about the roots of water fluoridation? Its very interesting, especially the links with the PR guy who managed to make smoking go from a practise only acceptable by males to capturing the female market basically overnight.

The story begins in 1924, when Interessen Gemeinschaft Farben (I.G. Farben), a German chemical manufacturing company, began receiving loans from American bankers, gradually leading to the creation of the huge I.G. Farben cartel. In 1928 Henry Ford and American Standard Oil Company (The Rockefellers) merged their assets with I.G. Farben, and by the early thirties, there were more than a hundred American corporations which had subsidiaries and co-operative understandings in Germany. The I.G. Farben assets in America were controlled by a holding Company, American I.G. Farben, which listed on it’s board of directors: Edsel Ford, President of the Ford Motor Company, Chas. E. Mitchell, President of Rockerfeller’s National City Bank of New York, Walter Teagle, President of Standard Oil New York, Paul Warburg, Chairman of the federal reserve and brother of Max Warburg, financier of Germany’s War effort, Herman Metz, a director of the Bank of Manhattan, controlled by the Warburgs, and a number of other members, three of which were tried and convicted as German war criminals for their crimes against humanity. In 1939 under the Alted agreement, the American Aluminum Company (ALCOA), then the worlds largest producer of sodium fluoride, and the Dow Chemical Company transferred its technology to Germany. Colgate, Kellogg, Dupont and many other companies eventually signed cartel agreements with I.G. Farben, creating a powerful lobby group accurately dubbed "the fluoride mafia"(Stephen 1995).

At the end of World War II, the US government sent Charles Eliot Perkins, a research worker in chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology, to take charge of the vast Farben chemical plants in Germany. The German chemists told Perkins of a scheme which they had devised during the war and had been adapted by the German General Staff. The German chemists explained of their attempt to control the population in any given area through the mass medication of drinking water with sodium fluoride, a tactic used in German and Russian prisoner of war camps to make the prisoners "stupid and docile"(Stephen 1995). Farben had developed plans during the war to fluoridate the occupied countries because it was found that fluoridation caused slight damage to a specific part of the brain, making it more difficult for the person affected to defend his freedom and causing the individual to become more docile towards authority. Fluoride remains one of the strongest anti-psychotic substances known, and is contained in twenty-five percent of the major tranquilizers. It may not seem surprising that Hitler’s regime practiced the concept of mind control through chemical means, but the American military continued Nazi research, exploring techniques to incapacitate an enemy or medicate an entire nation. As stated in the Rockerfeller Report, a Presidential briefing on CIA activities, "the drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means of controlling human behavior"(Stephen 1995).

The ‘dental caries prevention myth’ associated with fluoride, originated in the United States in 1939, when a scientist named Gerald J. Cox, employed by ALCOA, the largest producer of toxic fluoride waste and at the time being threatened by fluoride damage claims, fluoridated some lab rats, concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and claimed that it should be added to the nation’s water supplies. In 1947, Oscar R. Ewing, a long time ALCOA lawyer, was appointed head of the Federal Security Agency , a position that placed him in charge of the Public Health Service(PHS). Over the next three years, eighty-seven new American cities began fluoridating their water, including the control city in a water fluoridation study in Michigan, thus eliminating the most scientifically objective test of safety and benefit before it was ever completed.

American ‘education and research’ was funded by the Aluminum Manufacturing, Fertilizer and Weapons Industry looking for an outlet for the increasingly mounting fluoride industrial waste while attaining positive profit increase. The ‘discovery’ that fluoride benefited teeth, was paid for by industry that needed to be able to defend "lawsuits from workers and communities poisoned by industrial fluoride emissions" (Bryson 1995) and turn a liability into an asset. Fluoride, a waste constituent in the manufacturing processes of explosives, fertilizers and other ‘necessities’, was expensive to dispose of properly and until a ‘use’ was found for it in America’s water supplies, the substance was only considered a toxic, hazardous waste. Through sly public re-education, fluoride, once a waste product, became the active ingredient in fluorinated pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides, anesthetics, tranquilizers, fluorinated pharmaceuticals, and a number of industrial and domestic products, fluorinated dental gels, rinses and toothpastes. Fluoride is so much a part of a multibillion-dollar industrial and pharmaceutical income, that any withdrawal of support from pro-fluoridationists is financially impossible, legally unthinkable and potentially devastating for their career and reputation.

Funded by US industrialists, in an attempt to encourage public acceptance of fluoride, Edward Bernays, known also as the father of PR, or the original spin doctor, began a campaign of deception to persuade public opinion. Barnays explained "you can get practically any idea accepted if doctors are in favour. The public is willing to accept it because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows or doesn’t know"(Bryson 2004). Doctors who endorsed fluoridation didn’t know that research discrediting fluoride’s safety was either suppressed or not conducted in the first place. Fluoride became equated with scientific progress and since it was introduced to the public as a health-enhancing substance, added to the environment for the children’s sake, those opposing fluoride were dismissed as cranks, quacks and lunatics. Fluoride became impervious to criticism because of a relentless PR offensive, but also because of it’s overall toxicity. Unlike chemicals that have a signature effect, fluoride, a systemic poison, produces a range of health problems, so it’s effects are more difficult to diagnose.