By John Fritze, Sarah Owermohle, CNN
(CNN) — The Supreme Court said Friday that it will decide whether tens of thousands of people claiming the pesticide Roundup caused their cancer will have a day in court, or whether a federal law that regulates pesticide labeling will effectively block their cases from moving forward.
The court’s decision to hear the case has significant practical implications for agriculture – which heavily relies on the product – and Americans who claim Monsanto violated various laws by failing to warn them about the risk of cancer. It also raises an interesting political issue for the Trump administration, which is backing Monsanto even though HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long criticized the product.
The court will likely hear arguments in the spring.
Monsanto was purchased by German-based Bayer in 2018.
The Supreme Court appeal followed a $1.25 million jury verdict in favor of John Durnell, who sued Monsanto in Missouri state court in 2019, alleging that he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after being exposed to Roundup. A state appeals court upheld that decision.
Monsanto, which has faced more than 100,000 similar claims across the country, has argued that a federal law enacted in the 1970s that gives the Environmental Protection Agency power to regulate pesticides preempts state law claims like Durnell’s. That argument, if embraced by the Supreme Court, would likely foreclose many of the pending suits against the company.
The company has already removed the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, from the consumer version of its product. But glyphosate remains the central ingredient in industrial versions widely used by farmers.
The EPA under both Democratic and Republican administration has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate does not cause cancer and has declined to require cancer warnings on Roundup’s labeling. But in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as an agent that is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Several juries have sided with plaintiffs who sought damages after claiming they were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma because of their exposure to the product.
As the case was pending at the Supreme Court, a scientific journal retracted a landmark study it published 25 years ago concluding that glyphosate is safe. Emails uncovered as part of other litigation against the company demonstrated Monsanto employees were heavily involved in that study, a situation the journal said raised “serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability” of its authors.
“EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, does not cause cancer,” Monsanto’s attorney told the Supreme Court in an appeal filed in April. “EPA has consistently reached that conclusion after studying the extensive body of science on glyphosate for over five decades.”
Durnell said he sprayed the weedkiller in parks near his home for years.
“The result was a deadly and incurable form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer,” his attorneys told the Supreme Court. “The jury found that Roundup caused that cancer and that Monsanto was liable for Durnell’s damages.”
Monsanto claims that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state labeling requirements. But Durnell has countered that he relied on off-label advertisements from the company, which he said marketed the product as safe to spray without the use of protective equipmen