The Right Warred Against Fluoride
But Now It's the Left Wing's Turn

By Barry Newman
Copyright 2000 Wall Street Journal
April 12, 2000

THE CLIFFS, Grenada -- People possessed of fervent concern over some perceived yet unpublicized peril once had to make a decision: stand and shout or run and hide. Reclusive activists couldn't have it both ways. Now they all can. Electricity, a phone line and a laptop will do it -- and, in Darlene Sherrell's case, a hillside hut on a Caribbean island where the water isn't fluoridated.

"I came here to get away from fluoride -- to live!" says Ms. Sherrell, who started living 59 years ago in Michigan. "I ought to apply for asylum from the country that's been poisoning me."

She calls her hut a "concrete tent." She built it of cinder block with the help of two local men who are squatters on the steep, damp acre she leases for $200 a year; one owns the cow munching grass down below. The tent is round. Its diameter is 13 feet. The concrete floor slants with the hill for ease of sluicing. A water tank stands in back. In front, a drainage ditch has a crop of mint growing in it.

"My okra is making seeds now," Ms. Sherrell says, moving inside, out of the sun. She is small, dressed in loose cotton, with hair long and gray, a face only slightly lined and teeth just a bit off-white. She turns a plastic bucket over and sits, letting a guest sink into her hammock. "Snug as a bug and happy as a lark," Ms. Sherrell says, reaching behind her to bring out a bottle of Guinness.

She takes a swig, a declaration of normality, maybe, in someone used to getting the brush off from less diffident drinkers. Normally, Ms. Sherrell doesn't indulge in daytime. She naps, tends her garden, watches "The Young and the Restless" on a pocket television. After midnight, she has a Guinness or two, opens the laptop she keeps on a shelf behind her hammock, dials up, and resumes the fight of her life.

The fluoridation of public water supplies is "the most bizarre conspiracy of modern times," Ms. Sherrell has written on one of her Web sites. It is a scheme that "demonstrates, like no other issue before us, the infiltration of politics into sciencea cancerous corruption of our health-care system which must be removed."

For 55 years, cities and towns around the U.S. have battled Mr. Tooth Decay by infusing their tap water with fluoride; 145 million Americans get fluoridated water, and by every measure, their teeth are grinningly good. Millions of kids still come home yelling, "Look, Ma, no cavities!"

For 24 years, Ms. Sherrell has tried to out-yell them. She believes fluoride harms teeth and makes people sick. She calls it toxic waste. "Dosage is what matters when we're talking poison," she says. "That's my message. We're getting too much. Let's not call for new studies. Let's call for stop!"

People who know fluoride as something benign -- and this covers most of the scientific world -- consider Ms. Sherrell's views dubious. But no one could doubt the strength of her devotion to them, or the power they have over her. She is fixated and realizes it. "There are 1,000 things I could have picked up on and gone with," she says. "There's no way to know where this came from. I never felt anything like it." Ms. Sherrell sets down her Guinness and rolls her hair up in a bun.

Think of the Middle East. Of gun control. Of abortion, school prayer, health care. Think of Northern Ireland and affirmative action, of Darwinism and the death penalty. Causes without end. Industries have risen around them, employing generations of professional polemicists.

But what of causes unaided by the advocacy brigades? They're everywhere, too: Ban fishing. Disband the electoral college. Abolish speed limits. Boycott milk. Liberate Vermont. Promote forest fires. Legalize ferrets. Now and again, one will pop into the public eye -- blockade world trade, down with engineered food -- while the rest, mocked or overlooked, persist on the fringe and beyond it.

Rebels and loners have been around as long as backwoods cabins and urban anomie. In eras past, their drums were muffled by the powers who owned presses; even the Unabomber needed a publisher. The Internet changed that. Any Web site has better audience potential than a mimeographed tract. Anybody out to ban or boycott anything can post a message for everybody. And, as rarely before, lonely campaigners can find each other. All it takes is the right keyword.

As lonely causes go, the war on fluoride falls somewhere between ban the bomb and abolish the designated hitter. It began as a bugaboo of the far right in the 1950s, entering the mythology, via "Dr. Strangelove," as a communist plot "to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids." As the redbaiters retreated, the forces of pure food took up arms. A communist plot turned into a capitalist plot. The Cold War ended, but the fluoride wars went on and on. The local press cared now and then. Almost nobody else did.

The U.S. government counts fluoridation among public health's great wonders, like pasteurization. Fluoride has suffused two-thirds of the public water supply. Why not 100%? Because it's a local matter that often gets put up to a vote. When that happens, a few antifluoride snipers take aim, and city councils walk into a partly scientific, semihysterical cross-fire.

Fluoride always wins, almost, and the government keeps pushing it. Yet every inch is hard fought. The guerrillas won't say die. Western Maryland is a redoubt of fluoride resistance. So is much of New Jersey and most of Utah, as well as Wenatchee and Kennewick in Washington and Volusia County in Florida. San Diego doesn't want it. Los Angeles threw in the sponge and accepted it only last year.

"Locals are influenced from the outside," says Michael Easley; as director of the National Center for Fluoridation Policy and Research, he often takes on the antis. "When fluoride's coming to town," he says, "word gets out and the pros show up -- people who make their lives doing this stuff, people like Darlene Sherrell."

The establishment hates them. The American Dental Association notes that only five U.S. cases of crippling skeletal fluorosis have been confirmed in the past 35 years, and that even people whose natural water has 20 times the optimal fluoride level show no sign of that disease. The ADA dismisses speculative links to a long list of other diseases as well.

"No charge against the benefits and safety of fluoridation has ever been substantiated by generally accepted scientific knowledge," says a booklet it puts out. The American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization -- every heavyweight authority -- second the motion.

"I'm not going to believe a word Darlene Sherrell has to say," Dr. Easley says. "I give her no credit for knowing anything about science. I'm going to believe the Institute of Medicine."

But will the city council? You don't have to be an expert to know what the experts used to say about tobacco and asbestos. In the past several years, a small number of qualified scientists have been voicing new doubts about the safety of too much fluoride. This is the chief concern of Erik Olson, who heads the drinking-water program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a mainstream environmental group. "There really are some valid reasons to be concerned about elevated fluoride exposure," says Mr. Olson. "We need a fresh look at the science."

Roger Masters, a professor at Dartmouth College whose field is biology and human behavior, also worries about the kind of fluoride compounds that go into drinking water. He receives regular doses of Darlene Sherrell e-mails.

"If some people take extreme positions, you can say they aren't educated and their science is no good," he says. "Or you can say: Such passion is understandable. I call them canaries in the mine. They tell you there's something we ought to spend more time studying. Darlene is one of those people. Darlene's a canary."

A Watershed Moment

Until 1976, when a woman named Martha Johnson phoned her and changed everything, Ms. Sherrell was as normal as anyone who lived their 20s in the '60s. She'd grown up in Michigan suburbs and didn't go to college. As a teenager, she had stiff joints; Ben Gay was her high-school perfume. At 18, working in Detroit as a clerk, she had a bad allergic reaction to something. After that, she discovered Adele Davis, ate right and kept fit.

By age 27, Ms. Sherrell had married three times and was the mother of two girls. In 1971, she settled in Lansing with husband number four, a textbook salesman. "Vacuuming, dusting, homemade bread," she says. "The regular stuff." But Ms. Sherrell had learned to distrust fake food and saccharine advertising. One day, she wrote a letter to a newspaper about Red Dye No. 2. Martha Johnson saw it, and soon they met.

Ms. Sherrell remembers a heavy-set woman in a housedress, with a shopping bag full of papers. "Martha," she says, "told me this ridiculous story about the government putting fluoride in our water to dull our minds. It was a commie plot. I thought she was crazy."

A week later, Ms. Sherrell was flipping through a pharmacology text her husband happened to bring home. If anticommunism was old hat to people like her in 1976, anything that questioned the motives of big corporations was positively trendy. The antifluoridation command was ready to be passed from the paranoid right to the health-obsessed left.

"I looked up fluoride," says Ms. Sherrell, "and Martha was right -- not that it was a commie plot, but something was wrong." She learned that 10% of all children given even tiny amounts of fluoride show changes in their teeth. "That's a drug," she says. "All drugs are poisons if you take too much."

In her Grenadian hut, Ms. Sherrell suddenly jumps up.

"I'm at the desk reading and -- Oh, my God! They're putting it in the water!" She rests a hand on her guest's shoulder. "It was like this -- as if a hand came down and something said, 'Darlene, this is your job.' I didn't hear it in words. I just felt it -- the responsibility."

She had been called. In those days, fluoridation was mandatory in Michigan; Ms. Sherrell resolved to end that. She hectored the health department until the legislature took it up; in 1978, localities got permission to take fluoride out of their water supplies. Not many did, but it was Ms. Sherrell's finest victory -- and greatest disillusionment.

The state had given her scientific abstracts as proof of fluoride's potency. In the library, she looked up the full studies. She found a 1943 report about a man with bone disease and pocked teeth whose water had a fairly high fluoride level. But Ms. Sherrell claims the abstract had tripled the number. She says she discovered a pattern: danger thresholds inflated to belittle the threat.

To her, two and two added up to collusion. She decided the abstracts must have been doctored by the publisher in cahoots with industries that coughed out fluoride waste in making everything from beer to atomic bombs. Needing a profitable way to get rid of it, they "repositioned" fluoride as a nutrient instead of a poison, and dumped it in the water, she says.

It wasn't meant to do harm. "They were making a buck," she says. "That doesn't mean wanting to kill people." As to fluoride's vaunted anticavity powers, she is dismissive. "We've been educated to brush our teeth," she says.

Ms. Sherrell herself owns a tube of nonfluoridated Colgate. It's on a shelf above her sink. She's had it for three years, and it's barely dented. "I brush with water," she says.

For 19 years after her revelation, Darlene Sherrell wrote letters to editors, legislators, bigwigs. The establishment ignored her. She read research papers, amassing snippets to back her case. Dosage was her focus. A drop in tap water may do no harm, but kids get fluoride in juice and swallow it in toothpaste. Everyone, she concluded, is getting too much.

Yet she got nowhere. Once, she felt she caught a scientist in a flagrant error of arithmetic. She blew the whistle and no one listened. In 1982, as Ms. Sherrell recalls, Michigan breeders got the state to reduce fluoride in dog food. But nobody acted on human food. That did it.

Her marriage wasn't going anywhere, either. She left, and learned to drive trucks -- 18-wheelers -- and took her breaks in a tent on a beach in Jamaica. She met a man, moved to Florida, signed up for e-mail and pumped up her fluoride output. She and her partner ended up in Grenada in 1993, after a couple of years of island-hopping on a sailboat. Two years later, he took off and she built her hut.

It didn't have power or a phone at first; she worked from a cyber cafe in the capital. But in 1997, at the start of a two-year detour in Oregon, Ms. Sherrell got a laptop and discovered the Internet. All at once, her solo act had an audience and a wild cast of characters.

Net Working

Unable to afford a snappy domain name, she found a roost for her work among the fluoride pages at www.trufax.org, an agglomeration of genuine and junk science. She isn't happy about that now. A few clicks carry surfers from Ms. Sherrell to an essay on the "fluoride mafia" that warns: "Fluoride could slow us down. Arm yourself. Sleep with gun and knife. Spread the word. They can't kill everybody!"

"The scheme of mass control through water medication," advises another, "was seized upon by the Russian communists because it fitted ideally into their plans to communize the world."

Ms. Sherrell detests her virtual neighbors. "Some are weird," she says. "But I make sure that if my name's on it, it's going to be accurate." More recently, a site of hers got onto the Open Directory Project, a much-visited search engine owned by AOL. (The site's direct address is www.rvi.net/~flouride.) Her hit rate has swelled from a rivulet to a stream, and it has filled the coolness of her nights.

E-mails come by the dozen. She sits on a crate under a light bulb, replying. Often, it's a plea for help in a local fight. Ms. Sherrell will offer a whole custom-made Web site. "You could have sample letters to the editor, examples of the fraud, notices of meetings," she will type. The notes can be worried: "I have just stumbled on this site, and I am naturally quite upset about this. I had no idea." Or grateful: "You have helped us decide not to give our daughter fluoride!"

To the mom of a girl with pocked teeth, Ms. Sherrell writes: "I'm very sorry to hear your daughter has been a victim of the current fluoride craze. Perhaps she will become active some way in the future. Tragedies can turn into victories, so keep faith. Darlene."

On an afternoon after a night's work, Ms. Sherrell has moved her sheep to a new patch of grass, picked some peas, and is setting her sights on a Guinness.

"More people have discovered the fluoride problem," she says in her hut. "It's moving forward." The appearance in 1997 of a poison warning on toothpaste tubes (warning against swallowing the stuff) was proof positive; the Food and Drug Administration did that on its own.

She opens her beer, feeling good.

"I plan to be very old, very healthy, and very occupied," she says. A while ago, Ms. Sherrell spotted what she considers one more math error in the literature. She thinks it holds the "key to the whole argument" against fluoride. "We're going to fix those numbers," she says. "I'll get a congressional investigation started before long -- in five years, maybe."

Every few nights, she e-mails an official at the National Research Council, demanding a correction. In one of her notes, she asked, "Does the health of the people of this world mean so little to you, and the reputation of your colleagues mean so much?"

Ms. Sherrell is waiting for the answer.

Write to Barry Newman at barry.newman@wsj.com