The Montreal Star of February 22, carried the report that "A royal commission has whole-heartedly endorsed fluoridation of drinking water to reduce the "serious and major problem" of tooth decay in Ontario. It recommends legislation enabling municipalities to fluoridate water without the necessity of a referendum".
The commission which studied the matter of fluoridation for two years was made up of Mr. Justice K. G. Morden of the Supreme Court of Ontario, Dr. G. E. Hall, president of the University of Western Ontario, and Mrs. Egmont L. Frankel of Toronto, who was later replaced, because of illness, by Mrs. Cameron McKenzie of Beaverton, Ontario.
So now the people of Ontario's municipalities must prepare to battle the move to make of their water supplies a vehicule for obligatory, mass medication. If the recommendations of the commission are made law, no citizen will have the right to say whether or not he wishes to be treated medically for the prevention of tooth decay, which, fluoridators say will be the result of fluoride being put into drinking water.
It so happens that an anti-fluoridation work has appeared which will prove a strong weapon in the hands of those individuals and associations which are fighting to prevent the rights of citizens being abrogated in respect to medical treatment.
This work is entitled, "Fluoridation, its moral and political aspects. A new and comprehensive study." Its author is Dr F. B. Exner M.D., of Seattle, Washington. In the July, 1960, issue of the Union of Electors, we carried an article, "The foundation of pro-fluoridation claims reported shattered at Chicago hearings". In this article we introduced Dr. Exner as a prominent Seattle radiologist and one of the foremost opponents of the fluoridation movement in North America. We reported, briefly, Dr. Exner's appearance before the Ontario royal commission on fluoridation, and also his testimony at the Chicago hearings. We stated that Dr. Exner's complete testimony would appear at a later date and that we would quote such parts of this testimony as we judged feasible for our paper and our readers. This work has finally appeared.
The book may be obtained from The Greater New York Committee Opposed to Fluoridation, Room 909, 342 Madison Avenue, New York 17, New York. The price, quoted in the book, is $1.00. It is a "must" for any group or individual which may wish to participate in the fight to guard our civil liberties and to protect the population from what is at best, an uncertain and risky medical experiment.
Not a question of fluorine or tooth decay Dr. Exner opens his attack on fluoridation:
"The real issues before you have little to do either with fluorine or tooth decay".
In other words, the real essence of the problem is not whether fluoride in public drinking water will prevent dental caries or not. The issue is much larger and transcends the physical care of a relatively minor part of the human anatomy. Dr. Exner continues:
"These are just a new context for the struggle between paternalism and freedom between totalitarianism and the way of life we have called "democracy". In another context this same struggle has been called, "the cold war" and I do not mean that fluoridation is a "communist plot".
It is not. Resolved to its simplest terms, the issue before you is this: Suppose I, as an individual, want to do something to one of you for the sole purpose of helping you and you don't want it done. You are a sane adult. There is no acute emergency. No one else is involved. I have no other or ulterior motive. The question then is: "Which of us has right to decide whether I should be permitted to do something to you "for your own good" but against your will? Do you? Or do I? Those who think I do, are totalitarians whether they know it or not, and whether communist or fascist is unimportant since they end up the same. If permitted, they will band together to do things to people "for their own good" or "for the public good". When enough such band together they will constitute the government, and then we shall all have had it". By an inevitable logic we will arrive at a completely totalitarian government, differing in no essential from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or present day Russia."
The people of Ontario, then, must ponder seriously, the basic problem; not whether fluoritated drinking water will prevent the decay of teeth without harmful after-effects (though this has never been proved). For, after all, each individual has the right to hold an opinion for or against such a theory. And if the individual feels that he can safely take fluoride in his water, then he is perfectly at liberty to do so.
The basic problem for each citizen is: Can I be forced, against my will, supposing I do not wish to imbibe fluoride with my drinking water, to take it? Am I prepared to give up my right to choose whatever medicaments I wish? To follow whatever medical treatments, under normal conditions, I may judge to be best for me and to reject those I do not want? Am I prepared to surrender to the State (whether figured in the municipality or the province) one of my most fundamental rights as a free citizen?
Dr. Exner goes on, then, to discuss what he calls, the "complete change in philosophy" inherent in the adoption of the fluoridation of the public water supply by communities. He quotes a Dr. Arnold, one of the original proponents of fluoridation, as saying that the fluoridation of water supplies "demands a complete change in the general philosophy concerning the treatment procedures consistent with providing a group population a good and safe water supply".
"And the complete change in philosophy that is required is not limited to the question of water supply. As relates to the water supply, it involves such questions as:
(a) What is the purpose of a water supply? Is it to provide people with the water which is necessary to their very existence? Or is it to serve as the vehicule by which the proprietor of the supply imposes healthy bodies on the consumers?
(b) Where the proprietor of the water supply enjoys an exclusive franchise to provide water, may he substitute milk, or soup, or medecine, or some improved substitute for water that he has just invented?
(c) Who shall decide whether the "beneficial" effects of the proposed improvement in the water outweigh the harmful effects in the case where both benefit and harm are anticipated?
(d) What distinction, if any, should be made between the maximum amount of a known poison which may be accepted as "tolerable" if naturally or unavoidably present in a water supply, on the one hand, and the amount that may be willfully or negligently added for purposes other than purification of the water, on the other?
(e) is it the duty of the proprietor to provide the highest attainable degree of safety from water-borne hazard to every consumer? Or may people be needlessly harmed so long as the number so harmed is not "excessive"?
The answer to each of these questions hinges on whether you believe that the individual has God-given, inalienable rights which the State is bound to respect, or whether you believe that the individual is merely a unit of society, like the ants in the hill or the bees in the hive, and may properly be sacrificed to "the good of the community".
Dr. Exner then goes on to discuss a further step in this change of "philosophy" that which provides for water being used as the vehicule for other medicaments aimed at curing or preventing other diseases. He quotes certain authorities to this effect:
"As long ago as 1950, F. J. Maier, of the U. S. Public Health Service, told the Southwest Section of the American Waterworks Association that "discovery of the role of optimum amounts of fluoride in water has led to the concept that the treatment of drinking water might include the addition of specific substances to prevent disease". Dr. Scheele (of the U. S. Public Health Service) in discussing mass application methods for preventing non-infectious disease, said a case in point was fluoridation of public water supplies to prevent tooth decay. Such a community-wide attack on "far more serious diseases than dental decay" probably will be forthcoming after laboratory tests have paved the way, he predicted."
"Your Honorable Minister of Health (Ontario) was on firm ground when he warned you that: "If the principle (of fluoridation) is admitted we might just as well recognize that we have opened a door which the province might never be able to close. The principle simply cannot be confined to fluorides and there are already indications of this." "Beyond any reasonable question, fluoridation will serve as a legal precedent to permit drugging people against their wills with the alleged purpose of preventing any and every real or imagined threat to their health. Furthermore, it is my considered opinion that this is the primary purpose of many of its promoters.
Presuming that the promoters of fluoridation, as citizens of a democratic community, have the right to put forth those proposals which they, according to their reasoning, consider to be beneficial to the community, the fact still remains that they must give to their fellow citizens full and honest information in every detail on these proposals.
Fluoridation, from its very beginning, was mass experimentation. Before the fluoridators ever dared to state categorically that there were no harmful effects from fluoridating water supplies, they had to experiment with communities e.g. Grand Rapids, Newburgh, Brantford. Prior to the beginning of these experiments, Dr. Dean, the father of fluoridation" wrote in the Journal of American Water Works Association of September, 1943:
"To determine the safety threshold with regard to the possible effects other than on the teeth, carefully controlled studies must be made of populations who have used fluoride waters of relatively high concentration for a number of years."
In other words, experiment on the people to determine if there are ill effects. This violates one of the fundamental rights of the individual. Before he can be made the subject of such experiments, he must first give full and free consent. And before such consent can be given, he must be in full possession of all information relative to this experiment.
Says Dr. Exner:
"It goes without saying that few, if any, of the subjects of fluoridation experiments gave any kind of consent, much less free and informed consent. But, to make matters worse, the people who gave consent on their behalf were fraudulently misinformed. I refer to the city officials of the fluoridated communities who authorized and permitted the adulteration of the respective water supplies."
One of the recommendations of the Ontario royal commission on fluoridation reads as follows:
"That such legislation should authorize municipalities to introduce fluoridation by bylaw without the necessity of a referendum."
Is it not surprising, if not shocking, to find a Justice of the provincial Supreme Court, and the President of one of Ontario's largest universities, recommending such a flagrant violation of a fundamental right of citizens the right to decide whether or not they should be administered medication?
Why should municipal authorities be allowed to enact mass medication (for that is what the fluoridation of public water supplies is, no matter how its proponents may deny the fact) without obtaining the direct and explicit consent of the citizens of the community? Is it because such a referendum would presuppose an exposé of what fluoridation involves? And could it be that any examination, however superficial and made by laymen, might lead to the realization that fluoridation is by no means as safe and free from harmful after-effects as its champions would lead us believe? Certain it is, that there is a large and authoritative body of medical experts who have taken a definite and public stand against fluoridation simply because not enough is known about the effects upon the human body, especially upon individual constitutions.
The citizens of Ontario must prepare to take battle stations. With the support of the Ontario royal commission behind them, however inconclusive it might be, the fluoridators will waste no time in lobbying and pressuring the provincial government of Mr. Frost into passing the legislation which will make it possible for them to work on the individual municipalities. Such legislation would be an attack on the basic principle of individual freedom. Heaven knows, we are losing our liberties fast enough, what with socialistic welfare legislation being enacted at a rapid and expanding rate. Let us not lose the right to decide, when, how and by whom we are to be administered medical treatment.
The Union of Electors, through its publications and through the work of its individual members has constantly and vigorously combatted all such moves against the basic freedoms of individuals. Fluoridation is one of the most blatant and dangerous steps against the welfare of the individual, for not only does it strike at his liberty, but it menaces, by the uncertainty of its effects, his physical well-being.
Let the citizen beware! Let him stand up to the men he has elected to public office and demand that, should there be any question of fluoridating his water supplies, there must be first, full dissemination of all information, pro and con, on the subject, and secondly, the citizens of the community must be asked to give their consent or their refusal through the medium of a referendum or some such means. To do otherwise is autocratic, dictatorial and diametrically opposed to our cherished "democratic way of life".