Molena is a town of about 400 people with one flashing traffic light, a yearly Bigfoot festival, and its own municipal water system, housed in a cinderblock building with a dozen-plus filters to remove trace amounts of uranium from the aquifer.
Mayor Joyce Corley says it was not uranium but fluoride that drove the Pike County town’s water politics last week. The state Environmental Protection Division wanted to add fluoride to the water system, she says, to comply with state law.
Townsfolk were aghast.
“Most of the city council said it was poison. That they just did not want that in their water,” Corley said.
For generations, water systems have added trace amounts of fluoride, and health experts lauded it for fighting tooth decay. But when Robert Kennedy, Jr. became Secretary of Health and Human Services, he declared war on fluoride additives in public water.
“In an era of fluoridated toothpastes and mouthwash, it makes no sense to have fluoride in our water,” Kennedy said in April 2025.
Last week, 55 Molena residents voted in a referendum on the issue. State law requires water systems to use fluoride unless a voter referendum prevails against it.
Fifty-eight percent of them voted no to fluoride, overwhelming the 42% who voted yes.
The surprise here may be that the vote wasn’t even more lopsided. Secretary Kennedy’s boss, President Donald Trump, won Pike County with 87% of the vote in 2024.
Original article online at: https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/pike-county-town-banishes-fluoride-from-water-system-molena/85-08b75c6d-f1ab-4690-a9fb-fd08f46bb960