It’s now up to the Supreme Court to stop this chaos by pushing back on a Missouri court decision that defies federal law and threatens to create a regulatory nightmare. The consequences of inaction would ripple far beyond weedkillers to every federally regulated product on shelves, from medicines to baby formula.
If you buy a bottle of Roundup weedkiller at your local hardware store, its label tells you exactly what the EPA says about its safety and how to use the product properly, as required by federal law.
But thanks to junk science lawsuits filed by opportunistic trial attorneys and local courts ignoring U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that label and others may become meaningless.
It’s now up to SCOTUS to stop this chaos by pushing back on a Missouri court decision that defies federal law and threatens to create a regulatory nightmare. The consequences of inaction would ripple far beyond weedkillers to every federally regulated product on shelves, from medicines to baby formula.
If individual states are permitted to impose their own labeling rules on federally approved products, we’ll see a patchwork of regulations across the country that lack consistent, meaningful standards. This would not only create a headache for regulated industries, but it would risk the integrity that our regulatory system and the product labels we as consumers rely upon.
The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, explicitly bars states from creating labeling requirements “in addition to or different from” those set by the EPA. For decades, this preemption clause ensured uniformity: A pesticide sold in Maine had the same warnings as one sold in Texas.
But this year, a Missouri appellate court ignored that federal mandate and ruled that the makers of Roundup weedkiller should have added a cancer warning to the product’s label and upheld a $2.1 billion verdict against the company.
The problem is that had the company added this label, it would have violated federal law. The EPA repeatedly has stated that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, presents “no risks of concern to human health.”
However, this hasn’t stopped billboard lawyers from filing lawsuits based on junk science to pin the blame for tragic ailments on Roundup. These lawsuits rely on a single controversial study conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that claims glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
This study contradicts hundreds of others that have found the weedkiller safe for use. The IARC study was advised by an “invited specialist,” Christopher Portier, whose various conflicts of interest include a six-figure contract with law firms suing over Roundup.