San Francisco's tough 1996 law directing city and county departments to adopt IPM has been dramatically successful in meeting its goals. Overall pesticide use has dropped by about two- thirds since passage of the law.

Little if any of the IPM technology employed in this effort is new. tried and true methods have been available to achieve these results for years. The new legislation is obviously entirely responsible for the abrupt change in practice. I challenge anyone to argue otherwise.

It's only a matter of time before other municipalities follow San Francisco's lead. The results are too attractive to resist. Public employee organizations, parent groups and the media are sure to use this example to instigate similar laws in any number of locales.

How is it that it took legislative action to force t his outcome? The benefits of IPM have been demonstrated clearly and repeatedly in most if not all venues where pesticides are used. Yet in agriculture, for example, IPM implementation remains a paltry 15 percent to 50 percent of its potential, depending on whose estimates you believe.

Is legislation required to motivate us to achieve more of our IPM potential? Are we willing to wait for local ordinances to spring up and spread - or worse yet, a real or contrived pesticide scare to grab national attention and spur drastic federal legislation?

The best insurance we have against that nightmare is to put IPM to use in every possible application and tell everyone we can about it. If we do less, we invite others to take the steering wheel and leave us as backseat drivers in our own spray rigs.