I live in Canada and I grew up in a little village in the country. Our water supply came from a well that fed a cistern that supplied the town with water. The town water was chlorinated but that was it, no fluoride. I'm assuming it was because leaving fluoridation up to some guy that volunteered on town council would have been too dangerous. The so called safe fluoridation levels are such small concentrations that it would be really easy to poison everyone that drinks the water.

To make sure everyone got their fluoride, the local health unit (free public health service) would distribute little bottles of diluted fluoride through the mail. They would tell you to have your children drink a glass of water with a certain number of drops in it once a day. The number of drops depended on the weight or age of the child. I forget what it was.

We rarely did it. Sometimes we would do it right when the drops first came but mostly the drops would get put aside and forgotten about.

I'm glad I didn't grow up in a larger town with fluoridated water out of the tap. I always wondered if the dose was so critical using the drops, how did they regulate the fluoride in town where everyone drinks as much as they want? It always seemed weird to me.