Supreme Court tosses $1.25 million verdict for man who says Roundup caused his cancer
By John Fritze, Sarah Owermohle, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Thursday sided against a Missouri man who claimed that the herbicide Roundup caused his cancer, backing an argument from the product’s manufacturer that the lawsuit should have been barred because the federal government does not require a cancer warning on the label.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for a 7-2 court. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
The lawsuit at issue was filed by John Durnell, who became known as “spray man” in his St. Louis neighborhood for using Roundup in the parks around his home. Years later, after Durnell was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he sued Monsanto, claiming his exposure to the pesticide was to blame. A jury awarded him $1.25 million.
But the decision could have implications for thousands of other lawsuits that have been filed against the company over its weedkiller. And it comes on an issue that has increasingly motivated President Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” supporters. Hundreds of people who support tighter regulations on pesticides turned out at the Supreme Court in early April when the case was argued, a far more significant crowd than most of this year’s appeals have drawn.
Before he joined the Trump administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a leading advocate against pesticides. Kennedy was part of the legal team that represented DeWayne “Lee” Johnson, a San Francisco school groundskeeper who was diagnosed in 2014 with terminal non-Hodgkin lymphoma. For years he had sprayed Roundup around the grounds he maintained.
Durnell’s win rested on the idea that Monsanto failed to provide a cancer warning and marketed the product as safe to use without protection. Monsanto has maintained that the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, does not cause cancer. And the company said that a federal law that gives wide authority to the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate weedkillers preempted the state law claims. The EPA has never required cancer warnings on the product’s labeling.
Durnell is one of more than 100,000 people who have sued Monsanto over Roundup. That litigation was sparked in part by a 2015 finding from the International Agency for Research on Cancer that classified glyphosate as an agent that is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Monsanto was purchased in 2018 by Bayer.
Monsanto’s lawyers focused on a 1972 law, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which sets out extensive approval and label regulations for herbicides. The whole point of that law, the company argued, was to bar individual states from imposing a patchwork of labeling requirements on pesticides.
The company has removed glyphosate from the consumer version of its product. But glyphosate remains the central ingredient in industrial versions widely used by farmers.
Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, warned that if the Supreme Court sided with Durnell, it would open other industries that are subject to similar federal requirements to lawsuits. That potentially includes medical devices, cosmetics, pool products and even pet food subject to at least some federal labeling regulations.
Despite Kennedy’s previous advocacy on the issue, the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case and it supported Monsanto’s argument, warning that the lower courts’ decisions in Durnell’s favor would lead to a “state-by-state cacophony” of regulations. A Missouri appeals court upheld the Durnell verdict and Monsanto appealed to the US Supreme Court last year after the state’s highest court declined to review that decision.
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