State loses ruling on cancer warning

Despite three trial verdicts awarding nearly $200 million to cancer victims who used Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, California cannot require a cancer warning on the product label because it is contradicted by “the great weight of evidence,” a federal judge ruled Monday.

In issuing a permanent injunction against the state’s attempt to place a cancer warning on the world’s most widely used weed killer, U.S. District Judge William Shubb of Sacramento did not prevent California from including Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, on its own list of probable human carcinogens.

His ruling also does not affect the three Bay Area jury verdicts against Monsanto, now on appeal. Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer AG, faces as many as 125,000 lawsuits by users of Roundup and related products, and has tentatively agreed to pay $8 billion to settle 50,000 to 85,000 of them, according to a

Bloomberg News report last month.

But Shubb said the state, under Supreme Court rulings, cannot require a private company to change its label or say anything about its products unless the statement is “purely factual and noncontroversial.” A cancer warning on Roundup would not come close to meeting that standard, he said, because most regulatory bodies — including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and most of its counterparts in Europe — have found no connection between the herbicide and the disease.

California relied on a finding in 2015 by the

International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a probable cause of cancer in humans.

But Shubb said the state “may not skew the public debate” by “relying solely on the IARC’s determination, when the great weight of evidence indicates that glyphosate is not known to cause cancer.”

He rejected proposals by Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office to reword the label warnings to include both the IARC and EPA findings and a reference to a website for further discussion. That would still convey the misleading impression that there was an equal weight of evidence on both sides, Shubb said.

He had previously issued a preliminary injunction in 2018 barring the state from requiring the warning label. That followed the first of three jury verdicts finding that glyphosate was the likely cause of cancer suffered by a school groundskeeper in Benicia, a property owner in Sonoma County and a couple in Livermore.

At each of those trials, Monsanto cited the EPA findings, issued most recently in August, as evidence that its product was safe. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that there was evidence the company had unduly influenced the federal agency and had “ghostwritten” purported research studies on the product’s safety.

In a statement, Monsanto called the decision “a very important ruling for California agriculture and for science” and said farmers around the world depend on glyphosate products “to control weeds, practice sustainable farming, and bring their products to market efficiently.”

Becerra’s office said it was reviewing Shubb’s order.