Band Together to Fight Fluoridation

Interviewer: Doctor, can you talk about the Fluoride Action Network and what you're about and what sort of things you hope to accomplish?

Dr. Paul Connett: Well, when I got involved, my wife twisted my arm, I didn't want this issue because I was very much involved in waste issues. Been involved for 27 years has taken me to 49 states, 7 providences in Canada and 53 other countries. So nearly all my weekends, holidays were mortgaged. It was all pro bono stuff. I'm trying to hold this job down of teaching chemistry at a university and doing all this stuff on waste and then she comes in with this third issue of fluoridation.

And when she put these things on my desk and she said, "Will you read these?'' I said, "What is it?'' She says, "Oh, it's fluoridation.'' I said, "Take those away. These people are crazy.'' That's what I thought. So I had swallowed the American paradigm that people opposed to fluoridation are looney toons the Dr. Strangelove, etc. Very well constructed propaganda.

But, anyway, so 16 years of fighting this and very frustrating shadow

boxing, shadow boxing. Anyway, when we started to get involved we could see both historically and at that time in `96 that we had a very good chance of beating fluoridation at the community level. If it came to a debate. If both sides got an airing in the local media, etc., then we had a good change of winning. But none of this was adding up. Nobody was knitting these individual campaigns together. So that''s what the Fluoride Action Network was, was to bring these campaigns at the local level and sometime at the state level into a national and international level.

And our development from `96 onwards coincided with the advent of Internet and emails, and so on. So what started as hard newsletter typed out, etc., became this instant communication. So it was possible to network all the scientists in say Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Ireland, England, Canada, throughout the United States. We could bring everybody onto the same page. We could strengthen the arguments, make the documents available. And that's another thing, all the documents that they could keep hidden in the libraries and were very difficult access, now we can make all those documents accessible and visible and the latest phase on this is translating the Chinese studies that not even our English researchers knew were available. That's what [inaudible: 00:02:59] did. That's what the Harvard team did. They had quite a number of the IQ studies in China translated. So they had a much larger body of work to put into their measured analysis that any Western researcher knew was out there.

We are doing the same thing now with more bone studies and osteoarthritis and possibly diabetes and so on. So there is a lot more, many bombshells that are going to come out in the next few months. So that's really... I think the Fluoride Action Network has gone as far as it has because of the Internet because other wise it would be impossible to network all these people from Australia and New Zealand. Actually, I'm one of the few people in this whole network that gets to meet everybody because I've been to Australia and New Zealand and Israel and Ireland and England. and so on, and I get to meet all the actors. I'm a very privileged person. I get to meet, in person, all these people. Most of them are working two jobs, they have to earn a living and in their spare time and it's a thankless task. I mean, you're not made to feel good in your community. You're usually ostracized. They make a point of painting you as a troublemaker, as a loudmouth, vocal minority. It's very difficult for people to do that and they burn out. They burn out.

But the network is important to fight burn out because if you know that all these other people out there that are doing the same thing as you, they're all minorities in their individual communities. But I think overall you'll find in this movement a larger number of people who are incredibly well educated on this issue. Far more educated on this issue than most of the people working for health agencies. We know more about this issue than they because they only get one side of it. They only get the package of propaganda from whoever is pulling the strings. Very few of them do what citizens do which is to actually troll everywhere for every speck of information. We've got these little sponges out there that are absorbing everything you can think of, you know, about teeth, about bones, about brains and so on. My son being the classic example. My son, who was really, if we have any success I think 99 percent of it comes down to him, he only took one science course at university, beginning astronomy, and yet he's absorbed the whole literature of fluoride. He probably knows more about the literature on fluoride than any other living person and over the last...since March of this year he has been intensely revamping the Web site and getting the new literature, getting the Chinese studies translated and so on top of being a clerk for a law judge. He's just graduated  law school a year ago and for the last year has been clerking for a federal law judge. He has been working for 80 hours a week both and of the candle is it and it's just amazing.

So we thought when he went to law school that was it, that he'd done what he could for fluoride. He'd done the Web page. He made this lovely video tape called professional perspectives on the water fluoridation and people could watch this online. It's only 28 minutes, but 15 scientists go through ten arguments why fluoridation is a bad idea. There is a noble prize winner, there is three members of the National Research Counsel Report, there's two members, former employees of the EPA, dentists and doctors and scientists and myself. In 28 minutes I think the average person with an open mind would see there's something wrong with this. I would say that is our most potent weapon and if anybody, say, a scientific professional, having looked at that video tape and it whets their appetite, but they want to be more convinced, I think that plus our book should do it and then you've got the third component which is our health data base is constantly updating what we know on the science. The book has been now out for two years and when we wrote that book I think there were 23 IQ studies that we talked about. There's now are 33 so that we have to constantly update. Well, we can do that on the Web.