For any debate to be successful, there must be integrity on both sides as well as respect. This is lacking in discussions about water fluoridation, in which name-calling and disrespect are par for the course — particularly against anyone who dare speak out against it.

Stephen Peckham, director of the Centre for Health Service Studies at the University of Kent and a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Toronto, knows this all too well.

In 2014, he and a colleague published a study that concluded, “available evidence suggests that fluoride has a potential to cause major adverse human health problems, while having only a modest dental caries prevention effect.”¹

They recommended that water fluoridation be reconsidered globally, a trend that’s already increasing as the notion of mass-medicating populations with a toxic chemical falls out of favor.

Since 2010, more than 150 communities and countries — including Israel, Portland, Oregon, and Calgary in Alberta, Canada — have rejected water fluoridation² — so it’s not as though Peckham’s findings came as a complete surprise.

Still, his 2014 publication, and another published in 2015 that linked fluoridated water consumption to thyroid dysfunction, were met by a series of “poisonous attacks.” “Nothing prepared me for the ferocity around fluoridation,” Peckham told The Guardian. “I’ve been hugely and personally attacked.”³

History of Attacking Opponents to Water Fluoridation Dates Back to ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Film

In the water fluoridation debate, those who spoke out against it have long been labeled as quacks or zealots. This can be traced back decades, in part due to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.”

In the film, General Jack D. Ripper tries to stop a Communist conspiracy to harm Americans with fluoridated water and at one point states:

“Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?”

Of course, water fluoridation was not a communist plot — it was started by the U.S. Public Health Service. But the film pokes fun at the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing group that happened to be anti-fluoridation.

So, of course, anyone at the time who dared speak out against fluoridation was also ruled to be a fanatic, a radical or just a lunatic — even when they could point to legitimate science to back up their claims.