Last month I was contacted by a fellow at the Emerging Leaders in Science and Society organization and was cordially invited to discuss the state of the public drinking water in the United States.

Justin Lana (LinkedIn) further elaborated over a series of emails that he had stumbled upon my anti-fluoride exploits and would value my input for a water quality related project that he is working on at ELISS. You can read much more about this in our correspondence below.

What piqued my interest in participation and eventually lead to an hour long discussion is that Justin described the goalpost for the ELISS project being some sort of presentation to members of our water regulatory apparatus in Washington. While I had no hope that this meeting would be any kind of silver bullet for the fluoride issue I felt Justin was open minded and could potentially influence others in this area. After some scheduling, I eventually agreed to meet Justin for lunch at a nearby Indian restaurant to candidly discuss the “current state” issues from my perspective.

For my own protection and journalistic discipline I will sometimes utilize recording devices when traveling or publicly discussing issues of national import, however do not always publish what is captured. In this case, I felt compelled to admit after the fact that I had recorded almost our entire conversation without his knowledge and also requested publication rights. I felt the content of the discussion was valuable enough to deserve it’s own article and what you see here is the result.