COURT DEALS SETBACK TO WEED KILLER MAKER
Multimillion-dollar verdict against company stands
The Supreme Court on Tuesday let stand a multimillion-dollar verdict against the manufacturer of the weed killer Roundup for failing to warn of cancer risks.
The decision by the justices not to intervene clears the way for thousands of similar lawsuits against the company Bayer. The Biden administration had urged the court to deny the company’s request.
In a statement Tuesday, the company said that it disagrees with the court’s decision not to take its appeal and “is confident that the extensive body of science and consistently favorable views of leading regulatory bodies worldwide provide a strong foundation on which it can successfully defend Roundup in court when necessary.”
The case was brought by Edwin Hardeman, who was diagnosed in 2015 with nonHodgkin’s lymphoma. He sued the company, alleging that his use of Roundup for more than two decades had caused his cancer. He said the company had failed to warn of the cancer risks associated with the active ingredient glyphosate.
“This has been a long, hard-fought journey to bring justice for Mr. Hardeman and now thousands of other cancer victims can continue to hold Monsanto accountable for its decades of corporate malfeasance,” Hardeman’s lawyers Jennifer Moore and Aimee Wagstaff said in a statement referring to the herbicide’s original producer, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018.
The Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans. California’s labeling laws are more stringent. After an international research group classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015, the state required a warning label for glyphosate-based herbicides. The classification prompted lawsuits against the manufacturer of the nation’s most widely used weed killer.
An appeals court upheld a jury’s $25 million verdict and finding that Hardeman’s exposure to Roundup was a “substantial factor” in his cancer and that the company had failed to warn of the risks.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said federal law does not pre-empt the company’s duty to include a cancer warning on its label. The court said that an herbicide can be “misbranded” even if the EPA has approved its label and that a company can comply with both federal and state labeling requirements.