Like many towns in Massachusetts, we don’t fluoridate our water in Northampton. This policy (or lack-of-policy, really) is a holdover from the charming crankdom of yesteryear and naive misunderstandings (as well as willful misunderstandings) of the health science behind fluoridation dating from the 1940s. Every polity has its quirks, of course, and for decades, the resulting damage from fluoride inaction has been limited by the availability of prescription fluoride pills for children.

Now that one of those charming yesteryear cranks sits atop the Department of Health and Human Services, issuing witless and often contradictory edicts based on pseudoscience, conspiratorial mutterings and reheated folk-belief, our backstop against rampant tooth decay is being taken away. Yesterday, the FDA announced it’s begun the process of taking prescription fluoride pills off the market — this, based mostly on one aging, neurocompromised lawyer’s fixations, canards and amulets. We risk surrendering one of greatest public health triumphs in history and dooming children, especially our most vulnerable children, to lives of chronic pain and low social mobility.

Northampton had the luxury of indulging this mid-century antiscience pose for many years. But time’s up. There’s now no net. We need to fluoridate the water. We need to follow the science. We need to tell the charming, well-meaning cranks (and also the not-so-charming, not-so-well-meaning, Klan- and Bircher-adjacent cranks) the truth, even if it’s hard for them to hear. The hysterics of the old shouldn’t deform the lives of the young. Indulging strident crankdom is what got us (and the country) into the pickle we’re in now.

Scott Brown

Florence