Texas Comptroller Don Huffines announced on September 29 a review of the financial costs, health effects, and forced-medication impacts of fluoridation.
According to a press release by the Texas comptroller’s office, Huffines will review the following:
• How much is spent on water fluoridation statewide, including the state’s share
• The health effects of fluoridated water
• Other state-supported public health mandates and programs that medicalize Texans without individual choice
• How other countries and states have responded to fluoridation and which have moved away from it
Huffines declared in the press release, “The horrors of the forced medicalization of Texans should be criminal, and it is certainly a waste of taxpayer money.” He continued, “We should ask whether a mandatory, one-size-fits-all approach is the best way to promote dental health, or whether families would be better served by targeted, voluntary solutions.”
He also noted that changing Texas’ approach to fluoridation would save “thousands of Texans from having to spend lots of money to filter fluoride out of their water to stop government from dumbing down their children.”
The comptroller’s office estimates that fluoridation in Texas costs $6.3 million annually. Its press release noted that “some Texas aquifers already contain naturally occurring fluoride above the level needed for optimal cavity prevention.”
Growing Skepticism
Huffines’ announcement comes amid growing skepticism of fluoridation. For example, Florida and Utah have enacted legislation banning fluoride in public water, and multiple local governments have done likewise. Additionally, a federal judge ruled in 2024 that “water fluoridation at the level of 0.7 mg/L — the prescribed optimal level of fluoridation in the United States — presents an ‘unreasonable risk of injury.’” This ruling is backed up by multiple studies, including one published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program.
JBS — Ahead of the Game
The John Birch Society, the parent organization of The New American, has long opposed mass fluoridation. As Gary Benoit noted in Vanguard of the Americanist Cause, the JBS has “opposed fluoridation principally because of our belief in freedom of choice in medical therapy. Fluoride is put into the water supply not to treat the water — i.e., to make the water safe for human consumption — but to treat people. Any such mass medication of the public is communistic, since it violates the rights of those who do not want to consume fluoride, and it establishes a very dangerous precedent for other forms of mass medication — such as, in recent times, compulsory Covid shots.” And Murray Rothbard noted in a 1992 article for The New American that “compulsory mass medication is medically evil, as well as socialistic.”
Huffines’ announcement is yet another vindication of the JBS’s longtime support for medical freedom.
This article is part of The New American’s weekly online newsletter Insider Report, which is emailed to TNA subscribers each week. Click here to subscribe to The New American to receive the Insider Report and access exclusive content.
