Fluoride is in the dirt. Fluoride is in the air. It’s in toothpaste, it’s in mouthwash, it’s in those tooth-shaped trays full of foam many of us hold in our mouths at the end of each dentist visit. But beyond the small amount that occurs naturally, there is no fluoride in Portland’s water. And area dentists say it shows.
“When you’re taking a patient’s history, you want to know why they have a lot of cavities,” Barry Taylor, the executive director of the Oregon Dental Association, says. “Sometimes it’s, ‘We never had access to dentists,’ ‘My parents never took me to the dentist,’ or ‘I used to have an unhealthy diet.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I grew up in Portland.’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Dental Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all agree: Fluoridated water is an important tool in the fight against “dental caries,” commonly called cavities. Those same groups also say that at the low levels at which fluoride is added to municipal water systems, there are no proven negative side effects, though some people (including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary) argue that fluoridated water can lead to stomach and kidney issues, hypothyroidism, and even drops in IQ.
Portland is the largest metropolitan area in the US without water fluoridation, and, according to the CDC, Oregon is one of the least-fluoridated states: Just 26.4 percent of the state’s population has fluoride added to their drinking water. As such, Portland is something of a white whale in pro-fluoridation circles, and a point of pride among anti-fluoridation advocates. In 2013, pro-fluoridation activists spent nearly $900,000 in support of a ballot measure to fluoridate Portland’s water. That’s three times what the opponents spent, and the measure was still defeated 61 percent to 39.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, or the product of contemporary political shifts: The majority of Portland voters have been staunchly anti–fluoridated waterfor almost as long as the concept has existed. In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city to add fluoride to its water supply. Ten years later, it was declared a success: The rate of dental cavities in schoolchildren had dropped by 60 percent. Other municipalities quickly followed suit.
Some places went in the opposite direction. Portlanders voted to ban fluoride in 1956, following tense debates in the pages of the local daily. “I wonder if the medical boys can answer why it is they advocate drugging the water supply with fluoride at the taxpayers’ expense,” William Cavanaugh of Goldendale wrote in a 1956 letter to The Oregonian. “Why not include aspirin in the water, too?”
In the 1950s, some people associated fluoride with dangerous gas, pollution from aluminum manufacturing, and the nuclear arms race. Other letters to the editor from the time period raised questions about its overall safety, potential changes to the taste of water, and personal liberties. But public opinion was far from unanimous. “As Portlanders, we like to look upon ourselves as progressive, but we are no better than those who scoffed at Pasteur and Jenner,” wrote Mrs. Loren B. Mussler in a 1956 letter published in The Oregonian. “Perhaps we should stop adding chlorine (also a halogen) to the water and see if we have typhoid epidemics,” wrote Longview resident Bradley Gaylord Jr. in another.
Both are sentiments that could have been expressed in 2013—or in 1962, 1978, or 1980, the three other times fluoride has landed on Portland ballots. (Voters actually approved fluoridation in 1978 but overturned it just two years later.) Catherine Carstairs, a historian at Canada’s University of Guelph, says that for most of history this debate has largely transcended political boundaries. “There were always people on both the right and the left who were opposed to it,” she says.
Carstairs specializes in the history of public health and medicine, including the debates surrounding water fluoridation. She says the idea that the anti-fluoride movement is composed of political radicals and “John Birch Society folks,” in her words, isn’t necessarily true: Baby boomers, spurred by books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and disasters like the Cuyahoga river fire, brought environmental concerns to the forefront of the anti-fluoride movement. “There was increased skepticism about the industrial nature of our food supply,” she says, “the possibility that we were using all these chemicals with deleterious impacts on health.”
While many different factors play into which locations choose not to fluoridate
today, Portlanders often focus on the city’s pristine water, one of the things that drew environmentalists here in the 1970s. “One thing that’s interesting when talking about the West Coast,” Carstairs says, “is that places that see themselves as having a particularly pure water supply are loath to fluoridate.”
Original article online at: https://www.pdxmonthly.com/health-and-wellness/2025/03/fluoride-water-portland-history