Thousands of people who say Roundup caused their cancer were dealt a legal blow this week when the Supreme Court opted to protect the weed killer’s parent company from a flood of lawsuits.
In a 7-2 decision issued on June 25, the country’s highest court said that the German pharmaceutical company Bayer can’t be sued at the state level over claims that it did not sufficiently warn consumers about cancer risks associated with the herbicide Roundup. Bayer owns Monsanto, which makes Roundup.
The Supreme Court sided with Bayer, ruling that federal regulations preempt state-level lawsuits involving Roundup, the popular brand name for the herbicide glyphosate. The Environmental Protection Agency does not require products containing glyphosate to be sold with a cancer warning, and Bayer complies with the agency’s guidelines for its top-selling herbicide.
The Supreme Court decision elevated a case from Missouri resident John Durnell, who alleges that two decades of exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. Durnell filed a successful state lawsuit against Monsanto in 2019, arguing that the company’s product should come with a warning label addressing cancer risks. After an appeal, the case made its way to the Supreme Court.
In its majority opinion, the court sided with Monsanto on the grounds that federal laws take precedence over the state law that Durnell’s lawsuit hinged on and “expressly pre-empt” Durnell’s claim. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissented in the decision.
“Importantly, EPA’s regulations require a pesticide manufacturer such as Monsanto to use the EPA-approved pesticide label—here, the Roundup label without a cancer warning—unless and until EPA approves or requires a different label,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.
Because the EPA regulates pesticides under a law known as the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, states can’t put their own additional or substitute warning labels on products like Roundup, according to the decision.
A mountain of lawsuits
The Supreme Court’s decision is a massive win for Bayer, which faces more than 180,000 claims over Roundup. The lawsuits have prompted Bayer to pull glyphosate out of many products under the Roundup brand, though the chemical remains widely used in farming.
While the EPA has deemed glyphosate safe if applied as directed, that opinion isn’t universal. More than 10 years ago, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency classified the chemical as a substance likely to cause cancer in humans, though those findings faced scrutiny a few years later over reports that the published version differed from a draft.
Earlier this year, a landmark study determining that glyphosate doesn’t pose a risk to human health was retracted, more than two decades after its publication. The retraction, prompted by emails revealing Monsanto’s influence on the science, casts doubt on regulations that have cited the key research for decades.
Bayer acquired Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion, betting that owning a major player in the agriculture business would help it tap into a lucrative boom in farming supplies. In the years since, the opposite has been true, with Monsanto’s tidal wave of costly Roundup-related litigation dragging its parent company down.
Today, Bayer is worth $10 billion less than the price it once paid for Monsanto, though the company’s shares did jump dramatically following Thursday’s Supreme Court decision.