Fluoridating the Water Supply is Unethical
Community water fluoridation violates modern principles of medical ethics and informed consent
Water fluoridation was a product of the medical and scientific paternalism in the first half of the 20th century.
Medical ethics and the idea of informed consent have changed dramatically since Florence started its community water fluoridation program in 1960. The modern doctrine of informed consent in the United States did not appear all at once. It emerged gradually during the 20th century in response to medical abuses, secret government experiments, and court rulings that clarified patients’ rights.
Yet U.S. practices in the mid-20th century still often ignored this principle. During the Cold War era, government agencies conducted secret biological and radiation experiments on populations without consent, such as the 1950 intentional release of a bacteria in the San Francisco Bay Area to study the spread of a biological weapon, and the 1940s through 1950s intentional release of radioactive materials from the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State.
Such loose practices on the part of U.S. military and public health officials came to an end when the Tuskegee Syphillis Study (also known as the Tuskegee Experiment) was exposed in 1972. The resulting scandal precipitated the current implementations of informed consent and written, signed patient consent forms. Community water fluoridation programs, such as the one in Florence, remain as an unethical fossil remnant of the Cold War era:
“Fluoride is administered without informed consent when put into public water supplies. Although fluoride advocates sometimes claim that fluoride is a 'nutrient', the National Academy of Sciences has repeatedly confirmed that this is not the case (1989). Because fluoride is not a nutrient, the FDA has defined fluoride as a medication when used to prevent disease (Plaisier, 2000). Since tooth decay is a disease, adding fluoride to water to prevent tooth decay is – as a matter of logic – a form of medication. Informed consent is a fundamental principle in the administration of medication, and it stands as one of the core reasons why the majority of Western European countries have rejected water fluoridation. Fluoridation essentially permits governments to impose on entire communities what individual healthcare professionals are ethically prohibited from doing to individual patients— namely, compelling them to undergo medical treatment without their informed consent. … With other medications, it is the patient, not the doctor, who has the right to decide which drug to take (AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, 2012). [Community water] fluoridation denies people this right.” (Reasons to End Water Fluoridation: a Science-Based Assessment, 2025 edition, page 47.)
“As is becoming increasingly clear, fluoridating water supplies is an outdated, unnecessary, and dangerous relic from a 1950s public health culture that viewed the mass distribution of chemicals much differently than scientists do today.” (https://fluoridealert.org/key-topics/what-is-water-fluoridation/)
To meet current standards of informed consent, a warning statement would need to be posted in every location where residents and visitors might contact or ingest the water delivered by the City of Florence Public Works department: every restaurant, coffee shop, grocery store, medical facility, and hotel/motel room. Further, each resident or visitor would need to review and sign a written HIPPA-compliant consent form. Let’s save ourselves a lot of trouble and expense by terminating the community water fluoridation program in Florence.
It is impossible to control the individual dose
It is important to understand the difference between amount (a.k.a. quantity) and dose. The dose is the amount divided by the patient’s body weight.
Students at Florence city schools are ingesting an unknown and uncontrolled amount of fluoride when they drink from the water fountians on campus.
For example, 10 grams of a drug taken by an adult man weighing 100 kilograms is a dose of 0.100 grams per kilogram. If a child weighing 20 kilograms takes 10 grams of the drug, the child is getting a dose of 0.500 grams per kilogram — five times the dose as the adult from the same amount of drug.
"While regulating the dosage of an individual's medication is a common practice, achieving this precision with fluoride is unattainable. Once water undergoes fluoridation, maintaining a consistent dose for each person becomes impossible due to the varying amounts of water people consume. Disparities arise as some individuals, such as manual laborers, athletes, diabetics, and those with kidney disease, ingest significantly larger volumes of water compared to others. According to Dr. Arvid Carlsson, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology and one of the scientists who helped keep fluoridation out of Sweden: ‘Water fluoridation goes against leading principles of pharmacotherapy, which is progressing from a stereotyped medication — of the type 1 tablet 3 times a day — to a much more individualized therapy as regards both dosage and selection of drugs. The addition of drugs to the drinking water means exactly the opposite of an individualized therapy’ (Carlsson, 1978).” (Reasons to End Water Fluoridation: a Science-Based Assessment, 2025 edition, page 47.)
Those pushing water fluoridation often talk about the amount of fluoride being artificially added to the water supply as the current “safe level” set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This is a distraction argument because the dose is the critical parameter, and the dose cannot be controlled or tracked with water fluoridation.