Florida Bans Fluoride

Pushback of the Week, May 18, 2025

Florida Bans Fluoride

For 80 years, the U.S. has been a global outlier in strongly encouraging municipalities to add industrial waste by-products (“silicofluorides”) to community drinking water. Seven out of ten U.S. residents are mass-medicated in this fashion, accounting for half of all people drinking artificially fluoridated water worldwide.

The tide is now turning, rapidly and dramatically. Florida—thanks, in part, to the purposeful efforts of Scott and Jill Kiley representing the Florida branch of Stand for Health Freedom—just became the second state, after Utah, to ban fluoridation of public drinking water, effective July 1.

The Kileys stepped up their involvement in the health freedom movement in 2023, helping persuade the Collier County Commission to pass a health freedom resolution and health freedom bill of rights ordinance. Their development of strong, respectful relationships with the commissioners and other local officials bore additional fruit when one commissioner became concerned about the budgetary and health implications of water fluoridation and asked for their help in getting Naples citizens involved.

Citizens petitioned their commissioners to remove fluoride from Naples drinking water, arguing that forced medication violates both state and county statutes requiring informed consent. The activation of dentists, doctors, attorneys, school board members, moms, and homeschooled kids (saying “please don’t lower my IQ”) helped persuade the commissioners, in February 2024, to vote 5-0 to take the fluoride out.

Seven months later, a federal court ruled in a landmark lawsuit that fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk to human health.” Since then, 62 more municipalities have ended, suspended, or prevented water fluoridation.

On the May 15 episode of Financial Rebellion, the Kileys provide many more details about the groundswell of local activism in Florida that generated the momentum to make the statewide ban politically feasible. They also applaud other “superheroes” in the battle, such as Florida surgeon-general Joseph Ladapo, Dr. Ashley Malin (epidemiology professor at the University of Florida), Orlando-area activist Justin Harvey, and Miami-Dade commissioner Roberto Gonzalez, who achieved victory in the face of a mayoral veto.

Jill Kiley notes that bodily sovereignty was the critical issue that changed the tenor of the discussion, with fluoridation opponents successfully making the case that medicating the public water supply crosses a line. She observes that Miami residents who learned the truth about fluoride “were very upset and felt taken advantage of by the local government”; Commissioner Gonzalez agrees, saying “[T]he people are sick and tired…because their government has been poisoning them.” In the Kileys’ view, this makes water fluoridation an excellent—and likely winnable—gateway issue that can help involve citizens in the wider health freedom movement.

Stand for Health Freedom’s “Water Should Hydrate Not Medicate Toolkit” includes templates that can save anti-fluoridation activists in other localities and states from having to reinvent the wheel.

We are grateful for Stand for Health Freedom and its executive director and co-founder Leah Wilson for all that they are doing to support health freedom efforts nationwide.