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Two very different campaigns.

Whilst Councillors in Wakefield, UK, get dragged into the same old arguments, the fluoride challenge gets serious in Oz

Doug Cross
24th January 2016

Here we go again! Wakefield Council in Yorkshire has been presented with a dossier of evidence on the medical effects of fluoridated water. The local newspapers grab the story and run with it - and instantly the trolls emerge from their dens! What passes for intellectual debate on the Internet has now degenerated from what was originally little more than mildly amusing comedy into infantile farce.

The whole tedious confrontation over scientific evidence reminds me of that dreary old slapstick circus intermission, when wildly exuberant clowns threw buckets of water at each other, whilst the Ringmaster supervised the comedy routine.

But it is the persistent false argument promoting the so-called science of fluoridation that provokes and maintains the interminable debate.

The fundamental requirement for informed prior consent to medication is one of the principles that lies at the heart of the framework of ethics and law that we have developed over centuries. It is these principles that govern the way that the State is allowed to act in ruling the people.

The legal system is designed to ensure that we, the people, are able to enjoy those rights that are considered to be at the heart of the way that our society operates.

The fundamental question raised by fluoridation is, does it cross the boundary between what is right and what is wrong?

Legal precedent

In a landmark legal case in Australia in 2011, Judge Peter Biscoe ruled that the act of fluoridation could not be 'unfettered'. Even if legislation is in place that permits the practice, if some other legal constraint applies, then the State must abide by both sets of law.

Quite simply, you can't choose which laws you are inclined to obey and those that you ignore - the law applies to us all, including the State itself.

And medicinal law is one such additional hurdle - as fluoridation proponents are all too well aware. If you can force the State to recognise this, then fluoridated water - if actually licensed as a drug - even then could only be legally sold in properly labelled bottles!

The Federal challenge - whose law is it anyway?

The Oshlack v Rous Water case in New South Wales in 2011 only confirmed that State law endorses fluoridation and that the Rous Water project had complied with that branch of law dealing with the environmental and planning issues involved in the specific Rous Water project,The application of medical law was not resolved, even though clearly dealt with by Justice Gillard back in 1964.

Since then, this battle-scarred but unbeaten community has determined to take the matter above the State itself. Now the redoubtable Al Oshlack and his band of warriors in Oz leading the Fluoride Free Northern Rivers campaign have raised the cash needed to fund that challenge, and have found a lawyer to take their case before the Federal Court.

By calling the shots at the Federal level they are now demanding that the ethical and legal issues raised by the refusal of the medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), be settled once and for all. If fluoridation law is indeed 'fettered' then they want that established beyond challenge.

Quite simply, they're demanding that Federal laws on medicines be implemented fully over fluoridated water.

And if they can do that in Oz, the world-wide implications become very significant indeed. The law respects a precedent - at least once it's been set!

Time to nail down the lid on fluoridation's coffin

For the first time a legal action addresses the real issue that concerns the real people out in the streets, in their homes , their schools, everywhere - mass medication without consent. And the rest of the world simply ignores this incredibly important development.

I suspect that both sides have now become so hypnotised by their own obsessions, so bemused by their own self-importance as experts, that they have lost the ability to understand the Big Picture, and why this case deserves all the support it can get.

I have been saying and proving for fifteen years, fluoridated water is in law a medicine, drug, therapeutic agent - call it whatever you like . If this is true then the right (not the power) of the State to impose its consumption without consent is unsupportable.

As I and Bob Carton warned back in 2003, once fluoridation is recognised as a violation of medical ethics and human rights, then fluoridation will at last be consigned to history. It has indeed been the greatest medical fraud ever perpetrated on the people.

So don't look away now - you may miss the final nail being driven into its coffin!

In the same way the Ministry of Silly Walks acts as Ringmaster to the fluoridation farce, knowing that it's all part of the programme to entertain the public, and poses no danger to running the show. Indeed, the knock-about slapstick by the Men in White Coats is all an essential part of the programme to send everyone home happy and contented.

Time to stop digging

For the past 15 years I have been advising people that they need to adopt a different approach if they really want to settle this confrontation between the fluoride fundamentalists and true science.

Councillors are not, in the main, scientists. Nor are dentists. They don't understand the technical arguments, and simply parrot whatever beliefs have been planted into their heads in the past.

There's no point in continuing such irrational and uninformed arguments - when you're in a hole, stop digging!

Answer the question

That alternative approach is to pose the ridiculously simple question, what the Hell are we actually talking about here? For 15 years I have asked what, precisely, does fluoridation entail?

It is the action by the State of deliberately administering an active substance to members of the public in order to prevent a non-contagious and generally non-life-threatening disease.

Regardless of whether a person has, or is likely to develop, that disease, legal safeguards have been established to ensure that the practice may only be carrried out after the person provides fully informed and legally valid consent.

If no such consent is provided, then it is ethically and legally prohibited.The question of whether or not it actually works is irrelevant.

The appalling disclosures of the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War left a deep aversion to State-imposed medical experimentation. This has become deeply ingrained in the public consciousness.

And, since the evidence that is claimed to support the practice's safety and efficacy, has not been properly clinically verified, existing fluoridation schemes are indeed, merely extended versions of dodgy experiments on the public, expriments that go back over 60 years, but that still continue today.

The irrelevant argument that fluoridation is 'safe and effective'.

But there is a more urgent and basic issue here. The single thing about fluoridation that is of most concern to the ordinary person in the street is that it is a form of State-imposed 'mass medication'.

The people consider that their right to decide for themselves whether or not to swallow it has been taken from them.

Resolving this complaint does not require us to try to prove or disprove that the assertion that fluoridation is safe and effective is true - indeed, it's entirely irrelevant.