Last Friday Slate published my latest piece on the battle over water fluoridation in Portland, Oregon. It’s a public health measure (in strengthens your teeth) embraced by the vast majority of the medical, dental, and scientific community and almost every major city in the nation. Except Portland. On Tuesday the citizens of that city voted it down for the fourth time since 1956, basically because the opposition was able to use scare words–”industry,” “chemical”–and trust that most people don’t pay that close attention to scientific papers. 
Politically, that [the opposition's cherry-picked data] hasn’t really mattered. It’s easy to sow fear about chemicals being dumped in a pure, natural resource. The pro-fluoridation Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland simply seems to have been out-organized. They haven’t done a good job of refuting inaccurate claims, instead mostly sticking to arguing in favor of fluoride’s positive effect on dental health. They’ve brought policy papers to a gun fight.
“The anti-coalition has done a really good job of putting their junk science in mainstream media and in front of people in a really aggressive way, and the pro-fluoride side has been a little too nice,” says Felisa Hagins, political director of SEIU’s 10,000-strong Local 49, which represents janitors, security officers, and health care workers, among others. “We haven’t called bullshit bullshit, we haven’t said that the studies they keep showing, frankly, they are picking and choosing their science. Because [Healthy Kids] has been so eager to be inclusive there has been some hesitancy to do that, but that’s what we need to do.”
At least the pro-fluoride Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland campaign could have showed this clip a few times:
(The piece was picked up by Gawker too.)
