Bug Wars: Spraying the Word

Gird your loins. The Selling of Malathion has begun.

Over the next few weeks, wave after wave of sweet reason will come rolling in from the agricultural heartland. The boys in the John Deere hats have had enough of this hysteria over the killing of a few bugs. Some timely pacification of the south is in order, and appropriate steps are being taken.

Even as you read this, discreet polling is taking place south of the Tehachapis. Big agriculture wants to know how this anti-spray thing got out of hand and--much more important--how to calm it down. In the words of one of the veterans of the chemical wars, the farmers are looking for ways to bring the south’s relationship with malathion back to the “comfort level.”

The outfit retained to find our comfort level is the Dolphin Group, the Los Angeles political consulting firm that helped bring you the Recall Rose Bird campaign. So stay tuned and stay close to the TV, cause that’s where this war for the hearts and minds of the sprayees will be fought.

It appears, in fact, that counteroffensives are blooming all over. In Thursday’s editions of this newspaper you may have read where the governor has ordered his Medfly lieutenants to stop the political bleeding, spray-wise. And even our own county agriculture commissioner has launched a campaign to correct what he calls the “misinformation” being spread by those masters of propaganda, the neighborhood activists.

So here we go. California, once again, is about to do what it does best: decide public policy on TV. With this in mind, allow me to offer the campaign consultants some advice from down here in the spray zone. Who knows, we just may find that comfort level yet.

First piece of advice: Stop patronizing those who are being sprayed. These people are making a substantial sacrifice, and the issues they have raised about the risks of spraying are legitimate. When such issues are referred to as “misinformation,” and the people raising them called “demagogues,” you trivialize the process and create more anger.

Second piece of advice: Admit your past mistakes. A little confession is good for the soul, it clears the air, and gives you opportunity for a fresh start. You might begin by conceding that the spraying program has been conducted callously, in a military style, and has provided virtually zero opportunity for residents to ventilate their concerns. You might want to promise that this approach will be avoided in the future.

You should also admit that your initial assurances about the complete safety of malathion were not entirely candid. Too many scientists, some of them the very people who conducted the safety studies, have suggested otherwise, especially when used under the current circumstances. As long as you cling to your position of complete safety, the whole program will suffer an erosion of credibility.

And you might want to fess up about the state’s failure to develop alternative control methods. The Medfly infestation is no surprise to anyone, and the state has been on notice since the last major attack in 1981 that alternatives are needed. Why, given our past experience, has the state been unable to produce sufficient quantities of sterile Medflies? Why have no other safe controls been developed?

Third piece of advice: prove to those in the spray zone that there is an end to the malathion, and that the end is within sight. If you cannot do this, you will lose the hearts-and-minds war. Not only must you convince the sprayees that this infestation is being defeated, you must demonstrate that future problems will be met with different techniques. If a new Medfly emergency is announced in 1991 and the spraying starts again, you will have to roll tanks in the streets of L.A. to keep the populace under control.

In truth, there is a real opportunity here to come to grips with the ugly choices posed by the Medfly war. The stakes are huge for everyone, not just the farmers, and there is no easy way out. If we stop the spraying, we do not avoid malathion. We may end up with more of it as we try to stop the Medfly in our own back yards and as the farmers slap heavy doses on their crops.

But there are also limits to anyone’s tolerance. The whole notion of choppers flying over rooftops at night, dumping poison on people huddled inside their homes, is so abhorrent that the state should have started long ago to find other ways out of the Medfly dilemma.

Are the farmers and the state willing to look at these problems without blinking? That’s what we will find out when the selling begins.