They complained about livestock and pets dying, that their greenhouses were strangely devoid of insects, as if some toxic vapor lingered in the air.

For more than three years, a state pesticide advisory panel was dogged by growers, attorneys, consultants, Dupont public relations employees and scientists.

The panel was at the center of the Benlate controversy. Discussions often degenerated into whether information presented was "junk science or something useful.

Accusations of malfeasance and coverups ran rampant. Migrant workers appeared by the busload. One angry farmer passed out bumper stickers that said "Doo doo on Dupont."

"We heard a lot of rhetoric from a small number of people, but I think we got way off track and ended up chasing our tail," said Perry Sparkman of Orlando, a former Chevron employee and the chemical industry's representative on the panel.

Sparkman, who is now chairman of the Pesticide Review Council {PRC), added: "You might say that after three years, I don't think we accomplished anything on the [human] health effects side.

Politics ruled, from the courthouse to public forums, as investigators discussed how to get to the bottom of human health complaints that were piling up on top of plant damage claims that had cost manufacturer DuPont hundreds of millions of dollars.

The pressure points:

-- Government officials overwhelmed by the potential scope of the problem.

Regulatory agencies hindered by trade secrets laws and dependence upon Dupont to provide vital information.

-- Sick growers, suspicious of Dupont's clout in a state where about a third of its retirement fluid is tied up in DuPont stock.

The PRC has no real flinding of its own and is dominated by agricultural interests.

"That much is true, whether it is officially or unofficially," said Rodney Dehan, a groundwater specialist with the state Department of Environmental Protection.

An obscure panel, it often mulls issues such as what chemicals are proper for highway rights of way, how to combat propellor clogged weed on lakes, and even the environmental fate of mothballs left in the closets of winter residents.

The group does not have any regulatory teeth but it does have a statutory obligation to offer recommendations to the Florida Department of Agriculture about particular pesticides.

To this end, Agriculture Commissioner Bob Crawford formed two PRC subcommlttees in 1992 to investigate Benlate-related complaints of plant damage and health effects.

The committees quickly became mired in a political swamp that pitted growers against regulators and state and federal agencies against each other.

The University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences found itself caught up in the controversy when Crawford asked the school to research the cause of plant damage that decimated the state's nurseries and greenhouses.

Part of the conflict swirled around R. Hilton Biggs, a UF biochemist who led the plant damage investigation.

Biggs concluded Benlate was to blame; he sounded an early warning about health problems he believed were tied to the fungicide.

In 1993, Biggs' research funds were cut off by the school's deans and he said he was forced to retire.

The institutes administrator, Jim Davidson, said there was no intent to come down on Biggs, nor to thwart any part of the scientific inquiry.

"We spent a lot of state resources on the problem, and the end result is that we don't know as much as we would like to," said Davidson.

Some growers complained when Biggs was not appointed to the PRC committee. They were outraged that toxicologist Raymond Harbison was.

According to court documents, Harbison was paid more than $85,000 between 1985 and 1992 to serve as an expert on behalf of Dupont and other chemical companies that were defendants in a group of personal injury lawsuits in Louisiana.

'We will not give out any information concerning our health problems to [the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services) as long as you sit on this committee," Lake Placid grower Maryann Delaney said in a 1992 letter to Harbison.

The committee is now inactive. Harbison has said that his critics overestimated his involvement in the Louisiana litigation and that it does not create any bias.

Growers' mounting distrust of state investigators impeded the health inquiry, said HRS' chief toxicologist Roger Inman, who served as chairman of the PRC during part of the Benlate controversy.

Nonetheless, a handifil of militant growers inundated PRC members with scientific studies and relentlessly prodded Crawford, Inman and other officials to act.

"The people who have had access to information have sat back waiting for the victims to bring it to them," said Shirley Smith, the only grower on the council's health effects committee.

"And by and large, the things that have been brought to their attention haven't been acted on," she added.

Three years later, Dupont and public officials say they still know of no definitive link between Benlate exposure and illness, when the product is used according to label instructions.

But those affected say that for all the posturing, meetings and memos, state and federal agencies have yet to thoroughly explore the Benlate health issue

"Our position has always been that the human health effects issue should have involved looking at human beings, as opposed to what the PRC did, which was study data and read reports," said Carl Webster, an attorney with the Rural Law Center in Apoplat, which represents the interests of farmworkers.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency called it a civil matter between growers and Dupont. The agriculture department turned to EPA to interpret state pesticide laws. HRS looked to the agriculture department for funding. All plead poverty

To date, state decisions related to health matters, including the disposal of Benlate-treated soil and plant material in state landfills, have all been based on data supplied by DuPont.

And every agency has sidestepped the most controversial issue of all: the contaminants contained in the pesticide that was drenched on Florida farmlands.

Both the agriculture department and EPA knew by mid- 1991, within months of a Benlate 50 DF recall, that the fungicide contained at least two other chemicals - chlorothalonil and flusilazole, a fungicide not approved for use in the United States.

But as late as September 1993, agriculture department employees were telling growers that the agency "has no data concerning the incorporation of flusilazole into the Benlate formulation."

Six months later, the department asked EPA to evaluate whether the flusilazole contamination violated federal pesticide laws.

The answer: Apparently not. There are no provisions regarding adulteration by chemicals not approved, but not specifically banned, EPA officials said.

Scott Garrison, an EPA attorney, said that much of the agency's attention is focused on meeting congressional mandates to fill in scientific gaps for current pesticides.

"So what happens is that anything that isn't registered takes a back seat," said Garrison. "It would be nice if we could step back and think about the health and environmental impacts" of EPA decisions.

Grower Smith is not placated by the agency's position.

"If a manufacturer can go out and make the entire world's food supply its experiment, what purpose does this multimillion dollar agency called EPA have?" asked Smith.

If the agriculture department and EPA were not overly concerned about the contaminants, the state health agency was.

HRS officials have said they found the issue of contaminants to be "particularly troublesome."

But even HRS didn't hotly pursue more data on flusilazole until pressured by growers, who were alarmed to discover that they had inadvertently applied an unapproved chemical to their crops via Benlate DF.

Certainly we're concerned about flusilazole. It's one of the most long-lived pesticides there is," said HRS' Inman in a recent interview. "But thats under the realm of the agriculture department."

To date, no state or federal agency has tested soil, water or crops to determine if this unregistered pesticide persists in the environment.

Steve Rutz, a pesticide manager at the agriculture department, said that the agency did not ignore the presence of flusilazole in Benlate.

"It may be a relevant issue, but you don't want to be myopic. You have to look at the whole package of contamination issues," he said.

The agriculture department addressed "the whole package" during an administrative hearing earlier this year.

Using its own research, the agency pursued an administrative complaint against Dupont for distributing an "adulterated and misbranded product." The complaint named a half dozen contaminants, including flusilazole.

The hearing officer ruled that the state based its allegations on faulty laboratory procedures. He said that testimony from Dupont scientists, who questioned the state's testing methods, was "more credible" than the evidence offered by the agriculture department.

Plaintiffs' attorneys and state employees who sat in on the six-week proceeding noted that boxes of data were never entered into evidence by state lawyers.

"We tried to introduce them but the court disallowed it, claiming there was a lack of roundation," said an agriculture department spokesman.

Crawford's critics wonder why the agriculture commissioner used department attorneys instead of securing outside legal council to take on the chemical giant.

"If you tried to match the DuPont legal machine, you'd have to spend about $200 million," Crawford said in an interview earlier this year.

Growers have been more successiful than the state in convincing judges and juries that Benlate contamination and other factors contributed to crop damage. Although litigation has resulted in mixed verdicts across the country, growers have been awarded tens of millions of dollars in damages since DuPont halted its voluntary settlements in the fall of 1992.

In May - four years after the product was recalled - EPA filed its own administrative complaint against Dupont, seeking $120,000 in fines for selling a mislabeled pesticide. DuPont is appealing the action.

Even if the fine stands, the issue of human health remains unresolved. The agency's action may have been too little, too late, said Inman.

I think EPA should have been on this and more involved in the beginning," he said But EPA had its own problems.

In April 1993, as Benlate-related health issues were heating up, EPA Administrator William Reilly left the agency to join Dupont's board of directors. His successor, Carol Browner, the former head of florida's Department of Natural Resources, took office in 1993.

Meanwhile, the EPA's investigation of the recalled fungicide was hampered by the reassignment of the Atlanta-based agents who led the federal inquiry, as well as the reassignment of John Stockwell, the agency's representative on PRC's health effects committee.

In 1993, Stockwell, an expert on occupational and environmental medicine - and an outspoken critic of Benlate, who called the product a health risk - was transferred to another post within the agency, said EPA pesticide administrator Carlton Layne.

"There was a lot of potential there, but the case was taken out of the [Atlanta] region's hands," Layne added.

"Aside from some of the problems," said EPA product manager Carl Grable, "Benlate is still a good fungicide. Apparently it got contaminated with something or other, but the product has worked for a number of years."

Jay Feldman, director of the public interest group National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, said the Benlate affair demonstrates what happens when state agriculture officials "rubber stamp" federal decisions.

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