If you haven't seen, the Nevada Senate is finally 
getting around to pushing through a bill that will require Washoe County (Reno) to install fluoride in drinking water system. [RGJ]
Despite the massive amounts of scientific proof, local wing nuts are opposed to the plan. Some argue "cost" issues. Some argue "it lowers our IQ".
What you don't know is that this debate has gone on for a long time, and included many other crazy ass conspiracy theories. I especially like the claims that fluoride makes you become a socialist.
From Wikipedia:
Water fluoridation has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories. During the "Red Scare" in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, activists on the far right of American politics routinely asserted that fluoridation was part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime. They also opposed other public health programs, notably mass vaccination and mental health services.[46] Their views were influenced by opposition to a number of major social and political changes that had happened in recent years: the growth of internationalism, particularly the UN and its programs; the introduction of social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and government efforts to reduce perceived inequalities in the social structure of the United States.[47]
Some took the view that fluoridation was only the first stage of a plan to control the American people. Fluoridation, it was claimed, was merely a stepping-stone on the way to implementing more ambitious programs. Others asserted the existence of a plot by communists and the United Nations to "deplete the brainpower and sap the strength of a generation of American children". Dr. Charles Bett, a prominent anti-fluoridationist, charged that fluoridation was "better THAN USING THE ATOM BOMB because the atom bomb has to be made, has to be transported to the place it is to be set off while POISONOUS FLUORINE has been placed right beside the water supplies by the Americans themselves ready to be dumped into the water mains whenever a Communist desires!" Similarly, a right-wing newsletter, the American Capsule News, claimed that "the Soviet General Staff is very happy about it. Anytime they get ready to strike, and their 5th column takes over, there are tons and tons of this poison "standing by" municipal and military water systems ready to be poured in within 15 minutes."[7]
This viewpoint led to major controversies over public health programs in the US, most notably in the case of the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act controversy of 1956.[48] In the case of fluoridation, the controversy had a direct impact on local programs. During the 1950s and 1960s, referendums on introducing fluoridation were defeated in over a thousand Florida communities. Although the opposition was overcome in time, it was not until as late as the 1990s that fluoridated water was drunk by the majority of the population of the United States.[46]
The communist conspiracy argument declined in influence by the mid-1960s, becoming associated in the public mind with irrational fear and paranoia. It was lampooned in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the character General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear war in the hope of thwarting a communist plot to "sap and impurify" the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people with fluoridated water. Similar satires appeared in other movies, such as 1967's In Like Flint, in which a character's fear of fluoridation is used to indicate that he is insane. Even some anti-fluoridationists recognized the damage that the conspiracy theorists were causing; Dr. Frederick Exner, an anti-fluoridation campaigner in the early 1960s, told a conference: "most people are not prepared to believe that fluoridation is a communist plot, and if you say it is, you are successfully ridiculed by the promoters. It is being done, effectively, every day ... some of the people on our side are the fluoridators' 'fifth column'."[7]
To me, is just another example of the crazy, anti-critical thinking conservative wingnut coalition who oppose any scientific thought even when it to something as simple as keeping your teeth from falling out.
Has anyone ever thought that the cliché about a person's lack of teeth equating to a lack of intelligence, may have something to do with their communities fear of fluoridation (and science in general)?Come on Reno! Let's show the country we are not the idiots on Reno 911.
For once.
injured by Gibbons in a Veto Stamp Incident this weekend at the Governor's Mansion.
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