Want fluoride in your water? Too bad.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On the evening of June 2, 2025, the city council meeting in Pasco, Washington, was winding down when Councilor Leo Perales piped up from his seat on the wood-trimmed dais.

“I know we’ve talked about fluoride a few times,” Perales said. “If we can just bring forward a vote in the next couple weeks to just remove it from our water without getting any staff presentation, or hearing, I think a lot of us feel that we should just take it out.” Perales had made local headlines a few months earlier when he released a plan to establish the Department of Pasco Efficiency, or “DOPE,” a deliberate echo of DOGE, the federal so-called Department of Government Efficiency. 

Mayor Pete Serrano leaned toward his microphone. “I’m certainly in favor of removing it,” he said. Beside Serrano’s mic sat a blender cup advertising Titan Nutrition, a company that sells “Trigger Warning” supplement powder. The product’s label sports a dramatic image of President Donald Trump bleeding from his ear after an assassination attempt. 

By the time of that council meeting, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of Health and Human Services, had announced plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop recommending fluoridation, the practice of adding the mineral to water supplies to help prevent dental decay. Dentists were alarmed: Fluoride strengthens tooth enamel, and without it, acids can cause holes to form, leading to cavities, difficulty eating and debilitating pain.

While high concentrations of fluoride can give teeth a mottled look and cause abdominal distress, or, in rare cases, even organ failure, Kennedy had long spread disproven conspiracy theories that it is a dangerous neurotoxin that lowers children’s IQs. As a cabinet member, he was making it a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign.

Since 1945, when Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first American city to fluoridate its water, studies have documented marked drops in tooth decay and dental disease in communities that take up the practice. The CDC considers fluoridation one of the 20th century’s 10 great public health achievements, alongside things like widespread seatbelt adoption and declining tobacco use. Reversing course “will be hardest felt by Medicaid beneficiaries, including children and the most vulnerable Americans who often cannot afford routine oral care,” Brett Kessler, president of the American Dental Association, warned in a press release.  

But since fluoridation began, conspiracy theories about it have been “an ongoing, never-ending American obsession,” wrote R. Allan Freeze and Jay H. Lehr in their 2008 book, The Fluoride Wars. 

In the West—from Mesa, Arizona, to Port Angeles, Washington—communities have debated fluoridation for decades. Dentists testify about science. Opponents argue fluoride is poison, and many insist that “clean water” must be unfluoridated. In some states, a municipality’s decision to fluoridate is up to voters; in other places, residents must bring the issue to their council, which ultimately makes the decision.

Around the time of Kennedy’s pronouncement, however, Western lawmakers began sidestepping public input and unilaterally banning water fluoridation. In late 2024, the Aberdeen, Washington, city council passed an ordinance to stop fluoridation, ignoring a survey showing that local residents wanted it. This year, the council in Lynden, Washington, did the same after a motion to put the issue in front of residents for an advisory vote failed. And in March, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed the first statewide ban on fluoridating water in the nation, despite a poll showing that most Utahns support fluoride or think the issue should be decided by communities.

This summer, the Sweet Home, Oregon, city council also ended the practice. “Over the last few years, I’ve heard from a significant number of residents asking that fluoride be removed,” Mayor Susan Coleman wrote in an email to a resident. 

Yet a public records request revealed that Coleman’s emails from 2020 to 2025 showed just a single email from one resident opposing fluoride. “Today, fluoride is widely available through toothpaste and rinses for those who choose to use it,” Coleman replied to a request for comment. 

Now Pasco, a city of nearly 82,000 with a majority Hispanic population located in the arid shrub-steppe of southeastern Washington, was considering doing the same. 

At the June 2 meeting, after Perales and Serrano discussed ending fluoridation, then-interim City Manager Dave Zabell spoke into his microphone. “There are people who are strong believers in fluoride for dental health, and there’s strong believers opposed to fluoride,” he said. “My fear is that if you just make a decision without inviting input from those groups, it could just come back and bite ya.” The council ultimately decided to arrange a staff presentation on the matter and schedule two public feedback sessions. 

The first public session took place on a hot, dry evening in early August. One by one, about 20 people took seats in chairs with fading red cushions in the council’s chambers. Many wore medical scrubs. They were dentists, a dental hygienist, a school nurse, parents. Most spoke of fluoride’s documented benefits, especially to low-income communities, children with developmental disabilities, people who lack dental insurance or any access to fluoride rinses. Just two people expressed a desire to halt fluoridation. 

Spencer Jilek, who practiced dentistry in Pasco for 42 years, stepped up to the podium. “I was going to start off my speech by thanking the council members for being here,” he said, waving a hand toward the front of the room. But the chairs on the dais were empty: No council members had come to listen. “I’ve never seen a council disrespect the citizens of Pasco like this council is doing this evening.”

For drinkable water to run from Pasco’s taps, 15 million gallons are sucked up every day from the Columbia River and piped through two treatment plants, where it’s filtered and strained. Several chemicals are added to meet federal drinking water standards, including chlorine, which disinfects water to protect people from parasites and diseases, and permanganate, which makes water clear and removes funky tastes and smells. And, of course, there’s fluoride: Pasco spends $40,000 per year on fluoride to meet the federal standard of 0.7 parts per million. 

Surveys show community support for fluoride; in 2009, an independent survey of 300 residents found that almost 80 percent supported continued fluoridation. A more recent poll is in progress, but in late June, staff members discussed early results over email: Of 991 residents surveyed, 52.5 percent opposed removing fluoride.

Pasco’s City Council is composed of seven members, the majority conservative. A review of members’ fluoride-related emails from January to June 2025, obtained through a public records request, showed little demand for removal, though one woman emailed a quote from the Book of Revelation in the Jehovah’s Witnesses New World Translation. “Hopefully the fluoride will go away!” she added.

“This will be a big community decision,” Perales replied to one person who wrote in support of fluoride. “Thank you for your input and I will definitely consider it.” 

But late on the night of the June meeting, Perales emailed two other conservative council members, Charles Grimm and Peter Harpster, suggesting that his mind was made up. In the email—subject line: “FLOURIDE”—he laid out a plan for discontinuation: “This could be fast tracked and could be done by November if we move on it.”

“I say we keep it way more simple than that,” Grimm responded: He thought they should have a single presentation on the matter “and vote the next week.”

“Sounds good to me. If we have the votes, let’s do it,” Perales replied. 

Not everyone on Pasco’s city council opposes fluoridation. “I do not support removal as I represent the many that have seen the benefits of this mineral in Pasco water,” Councilor Blanche Barajas emailed HCN.

Both Grimm and Perales declined to answer questions for this story. While Pasco has discussed fluoridation in the past, the recent debate came “out of nowhere,” said Janae Parent, district administrator of the Benton-Franklin Health District. Did the council come to the health district asking for information on fluoride? “No, they did not.”  

“Having been born and raised here, I’ve got those conservative values in me as a leader,” she said. “But we’ve got some responsibility here as a community to also take a look at facts, take a look at studies, and understand where we want to be, not just what’s being said at a national level, and not have groupthink.”

“Why would you choose an issue that would actually hurt people?” Jilek, the dentist who testified to an empty dais in August, said later. “This is not the hill they should want to die on.”

Seth Cotlar, a history professor at Willamette University who writes about the history of far-right politics, wondered the same thing. “How does something that isn’t an issue become an issue?” he said. “And why would you want to make that thing an issue?”

He pointed out that, in the past, ultraconservative groups like the John Birch Society pushed conspiracy theories warning that fluoridation was part of a Communist plot. In the 1950s, the Los Angeles-based anti-Communist Keep America Committee distributed a leaflet naming what it believed were “The Unholy Three”: polio vaccines, mental hygiene and fluoridated water. By adopting fluoride, “every citizen will be at the mercy of the enemy—already within our gates,” it read. 

Fluoride’s sudden revival as a hot-button issue is “connected to this generalized world of conspiracy, which MAHA has amplified,” Cotlar said. “(The podcast Conspirituality has) a line that I really like, which is that these MAHA people, they get the feelings right, but the facts wrong. Especially around health, there’s a real sense of vulnerability and uncertainty and fear and anxiety and mistrust of our health system.” That creates an environment, he said, “for people to rush in with simple answers.” 

But it also plays into real concerns. Amarnath Amarasingam, an associate professor at the School of Religion and the Department of Political Studies at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, said Kennedy exploits real issues—water pollution, lack of access to healthy food to sow conspiracy theories and mistrust of science.  “At the core, he’s saying we eat very unhealthy foods. Well, yeah, that’s true; all doctors have been saying that forever. And then it becomes ‘vaccines are bad for us…vaccines were produced by evil deep-state actors in order to keep us subservient.’ And now you’re in the conspiracy space.”

Amarasingam said that if people really believe fluoride is toxic but unavoidable, that could contribute to an overall feeling of powerlessness. “Anti-fluoride activism might be a symptom of this overwhelming sense that forest fires, pandemics, whatever else is going on—things are collapsing. All I can really do is protect the four walls around my kids and myself. It might be a symptom of this sense of chaos.”

As fall closed in, Pasco’s council changed, but the fluoride issue remained. 

Serrano was tapped by the Trump administration to be the interim US Attorney of eastern Washington, and the council voted to replace him with Joe Cotta, a prominent conservative pastor.  

In mid-September, the council held another listening session. This time, six members were present. Dentists, teachers, parents and the heads of the local and state dental associations all testified in favor of fluoride. 

Lilo Black, a local dentist, stepped to the microphone first and brought up a recent decision by the council to honor Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist killed in September. “In your proclamation, you recounted how Charlie wanted people to think critically and engage civically…So I find it so perplexing that when it comes to the matter at hand, water fluoridation in Pasco, that you have completely diverged from the very tenets you espouse,” she said. “In fact, the origin of this issue seems to be a mystery.”

Just four locals spoke against fluoridation. “Fluoride is a neurotoxin,” Lacey Walter said. “I grew up with well water, my parents opted out of fluoride, I never used fluoridated toothpaste and my teeth are fine.”

No matter how strongly held their opinions or how great their expertise, the most that Pasco residents could do was testify. None would be able to vote on the issue directly. 

After the meeting, Parent, the health district administrator, was hopeful. “The council was actively listening and asking questions,” she said. “So it’s possible we may have made some headway in having more thoughtful discussions moving forward.”

The council is set to vote on the issue in mid-November.