Episode #283
Chuck Benbrook: The Supreme Court’s Big Win for Bayer-Monsanto

Chuck Benbrook breaks down the Supreme Court decision that handed Bayer-Monsanto a major victory in Roundup litigation, and explains why the ruling could reshape pesticide accountability for years to come. Drawing on decades of work in pesticide regulation, public health, and agricultural policy, he shows how the case goes far beyond one cancer victim or one herbicide. At stake is whether people harmed by pesticides will still be able to seek justice when federal regulators fail, and whether the courts will continue to serve as one of the last meaningful checks on industry power.

Our Chuck Benbrook interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Chuck Benbrook on June 26, 2026 online

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking with Chuck Benbrook today. Chuck, I’m so glad that we managed to jump on this and have time to discuss this recent Supreme Court decision that just happened yesterday. I’m not going to explain it to you; you’re going to explain it to me. Can you tell me what happened with the Supreme Court and the chemical company Bayer-Monsanto yesterday?

Chuck Benbrook 0:29
The Supreme Court issued its ruling in the appeal of Durnell v. Bayer-Monsanto case involving Roundup and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was a slam dunk win for Bayer-Monsanto, with a very surprising 7-2 vote, with two of the liberal justices joining the conservative justices.

Chuck Benbrook 0:58
Another odd thing about the vote, the dissenting opinion by Justice Jackson was joined by Neil Gorsuch, one of the conservative Republicans. It’s a very unexpected outcome in a monumentally significant case, impacting the kinds of risks we’re all going to face from pesticides for many years to come.

Dave Chapman 1:29
I know it was significant. I was very upset, but why is it significant for people who are not steeped in understanding the legal niceties?

Chuck Benbrook 1:42
Very important question. It’s so significant because the pesticide industry in the last 10 and 20 years has gained a significant degree of influence in federal EPA and has really been able to get its way for the most part on pesticide regulatory decisions. It’s one of the reasons glyphosate Roundup herbicides are still on the market with no changes in how it can be used, despite all the evidence linking it to cancer.

Chuck Benbrook 2:28
The courts and the right of people that are harmed by pesticides to seek justice and seek compensation through the courts has become increasingly important as a check on the power of the industry and the accountability of both federal and state regulatory agencies.

Chuck Benbrook 2:46
In the last 15 years or so, pesticide regulation hasn’t had nearly as big of an impact on the pesticide market as litigation has, because when people who are harmed by pesticides are able to get into a court in front of a jury, the rules of jurisprudence, which are the rules that govern how court cases unfold, are really set up to be as fair as possible to both sides of the case, the defendants and whoever the plaintiff is that is arguing that they were in some way injured.

Chuck Benbrook 3:35
By the Supreme Court turning over past precedents that allowed individuals to cite a failure to warn on a pesticide label as causes of action or as one of the foundations of a lawsuit, it is going to be much more difficult and uncommon for people to be able to get their cases into a court and ruled on by a jury.

Chuck Benbrook 4:17
It’s really removed the biggest threat to the pesticide industry of being held accountable for when they decide to cut corners and take risks with your health, my health, and my kids’ health.

Dave Chapman 4:37
How big a risk has it been for the chemical companies? How bad have the penalties been?

Chuck Benbrook 4:44
They’ve been monumental. In the last 10 years there have been three major bodies of litigation, one involving the insecticide chlorpyrifos and children’s neural development. A second one, the big one involving Bayer-Monsanto’s Roundup and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and the third being the litigation involving Paraquat, a Syngenta herbicide, and Parkinson’s disease.

Chuck Benbrook 5:20
Those three bodies of litigation have cost the pesticide industry almost certainly over $30 billion in the last decade. That is enough money to get the attention of these multinational companies and their investors.

Dave Chapman 5:42
This decision that came down, the case was explicitly about Roundup and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, so it was Bayer-Monsanto, but their decision is going to impact the Paraquat cases. Is that right? All of those cases?

Chuck Benbrook 6:05
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Bayer-Monsanto appeal of a $1.25 million jury award to John Durnell, who was a homeowner in the St. Louis area who sprayed Roundup for 15 years and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. That’s a very common scenario or circumstance for individuals in the Roundup litigation.

Dave Chapman 6:40
Was John Durnell spraying that entirely at his home, or was he also doing it as part of a job?

Chuck Benbrook 6:49
Entirely on his urban house, just normal size lot. But it turns out Dave, having been involved with the litigation since the beginning, coming on 11 years now. I have fairly detailed knowledge of dozens of the cases, and the majority of the cases are just homeowners, people that have rural properties who are all in on about controlling weeds, and there are a lot of people that don’t like weeds at all, and have used Roundup and other herbicides very aggressively to control weeds.

Chuck Benbrook 7:38
These are the kind of people that we’re concerned about in terms of the public health impacts, because the exposures that people get from handling and applying a pesticide, particularly with small scale equipment like just a hand sprayer or back sprayer or a boom on the back of an ATV, those are very high exposure scenarios compared to going out into a modern spray rig that has a glass steel cab and a sophisticated air filtration system.

Chuck Benbrook 8:14
A person in a machine like that could spray 300, even 400 acres a day, which is a massive area, but the person spraying 400 pounds of glyphosate on 400 acres in an eight hour workday in a modern machine is exposed to far less glyphosate than a homeowner that goes out with their spray bottle that they bought at Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Walmart, and walks around and sprays weeds in their yard without gloves.

Chuck Benbrook 8:20
A lot of people would spray with flip flops or tennis shoes on and shorts, and they would get spray solution on their skin. That’s why the high exposure episodes of so many of the people involved in litigation happened from applying home use products.

Dave Chapman 9:19
Yeah. But of course, farm workers are exposed and constantly, and with great health problems as a result of that too, but this particular case was a homeowner, and it was about a Bayer-Monsanto product, the most widely used herbicide in the world.

Chuck Benbrook 9:49
The most widely used pesticide in the world, by far. Probably by about a factor of three, and the second most widely used pesticide and herbicide would be atrazine.

Dave Chapman 10:06
Yeah. Are there a lot of cases coming about atrazine? Were there before this?

Chuck Benbrook 10:12
There have been cases in the past involving municipal drinking water facilities, primarily in the Midwest, that incurred large expenditures to pay for filtration systems to take atrazine out of the water that they were delivering to their customers. Those water districts got together and sued Syngenta for the cost of the filtration systems. That was a successful case that was settled. It was probably $500 million, or something on that order.

Dave Chapman 10:56
Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook 10:56
Back to the John Durnell case, the Bayer-Monsanto attorneys chose that case because the jury award of the $1.25 million was based solely on the failure-to-warn claim or cause of action. Many of the other Roundup non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases, the lawyers cite at least three causes of action: failure to warn, negligence, and design defect, so selling a product that is unnecessarily and inherently dangerous.

Chuck Benbrook 11:39
This ruling by the Supreme Court, it won’t end the Roundup non-Hodgkin lymphoma litigation, but it will pare it down very substantially, probably to less than 10% of the cases that would be regarded as viable to try to take into a court and prove without being able to point to the failure of Bayer-Monsanto to warn on the label about the fact that they knew that glyphosate damaged human DNA in ways that start cells on the path to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Dave Chapman 12:24
Just to help people understand, in the case of glyphosate, non-Hodgkin lymphoma is kind of a signature cancer. It’s something that traditionally people only got when they were much older. It was very rare in younger people, and now it’s become much more common.

Chuck Benbrook 12:46
I think it is the most common blood cancer. About 70,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. It’s a stubborn cancer. Many of the plaintiffs in this litigation, Dave, went through four, five, even six rounds of chemotherapy over a three-, four-, or five-year period. When they would go into remission for several months, maybe a year after the chemotherapy, but then the cancer would return.

Chuck Benbrook 13:26
After four, five, or six rounds of chemotherapy, most oncologists say to their patient, “We got to do a stem cell transplant to try to empower your immune system to be able to snuff out the proliferation, the growth of the cancerous cells in the person’s body that are killing them.”

Chuck Benbrook 13:50
A stem cell transplant is a very expensive operation. I think it’s something like $300,000. It has huge impacts on the person, because in order for a stem cell transplant to work, they have to knock out your immune system basically to give the new cells a chance to become part of your immune system in the future.

Dave Chapman 14:27
I am close to somebody who’s going through this, a young person, my nephew. It’s a terrible thing. It’s a terrifying thing. It’s tough. I only mentioned that because it’s so easy to talk about cancer as this distant thing that happens to somebody else, and until it happens to you or somebody that you love, and then it’s a terrible and painful thing.

Dave Chapman 15:01
The EPA has decided that, in fact, glyphosate, and presumably the formulations it’s used in, do not cause cancer, but the rest of the world seems to disagree about this. Could you talk about that?

Chuck Benbrook 15:16
Sure, the EPA considered glyphosate a possible human carcinogen from 1984 to 1991. In 1991, after basically six years of aggressive interventions by Bayer-Monsanto with the U.S. EPA challenging the scientific basis of the EPA classification of glyphosate as a possible human carcinogen, the EPA changed its position and classified it as not likely to cause cancer.

Chuck Benbrook 16:02
From 1991 on, that has been the official classification decision of the Office of Pesticide Programs. However, in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in March of that year, released an unexpected, shocking new classification of glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides as probable human carcinogens.

Chuck Benbrook 16:35
Nobody in the field working on pesticides saw that coming. The data on glyphosate was pretty good, pretty clean, and yet this highly regarded international body, after a large team of independent scientists that did not work for or were not professionally aligned with the pesticide industry, after they looked at all the data, they said, “No, wait a minute.” They said there was strong evidence that glyphosate damages DNA.

Chuck Benbrook 17:14
Really, all cancer begins from damage to DNA. It’s cells that have their DNA scrambled in a particular way. Those are the cells that become cancer. In 2015, when IARC said that there’s strong evidence, they call it mechanistic evidence, and by mechanistic, it means the mechanism through which exposure to glyphosate can cause cancer.

Chuck Benbrook 17:48
The IARC concluded that there was strong mechanistic evidence and supporting evidence, not as strong in the area of animal studies, so in the mouse and rat studies where they had been fed glyphosate, and then in the epidemiological data as well, where scientists studied populations of people that were occupationally exposed to glyphosate.

Chuck Benbrook 18:16
When the International Agency for Research on Cancer issued this unexpected and, many people regarded as really shocking classification, that said to the EPA administrator, whose Office of Pesticide Programs still was saying that it was not likely to pose cancer, her name was Gina McCarthy, the EPA administrator in 2015, she asked the Office of Research and Development, another part of EPA, to try to explain to her and other people in EPA and people outside of EPA why the Office of Pesticide Programs in the EPA says “not likely to cause cancer,” and the International Agency for Research on Cancer says “probable human carcinogen.”

Chuck Benbrook 19:15
The result of the Office of Research and Development review basically aligned with the IARC judgment. It was clear that the scientists that composed the task force in the Office of Research and Development of EPA were fairly clear that glyphosate should have been classified either as a possible or probable human carcinogen.

Chuck Benbrook 19:45
Once that happened, and when that information is presented to juries, it is not so easy for the Bayer-Monsanto lawyers and experts to convince the juries that EPA says it’s not likely to cause cancer, because part of EPA says it’s not likely to cause cancer, but another part of EPA has rendered judgment that it probably does.

Dave Chapman 20:16
One of the things that this case brings up so spectacularly and dismally is the influence of money and power on this process. Bayer-Monsanto is obviously one of the most powerful companies in the world. We’ve seen their direct influence on our own federal government and some state governments too. We’ve got three states now whose state legislatures have passed liability shields to protect Bayer-Monsanto, and there was a lot of lobbying going on there.

Dave Chapman 21:01
I can’t see what in the world the benefit is to their citizens to make it so that they cannot sue for damages to a chemical company. Do you have any thoughts about this? Am I exaggerating the influence of Bayer-Monsanto on our government?

Chuck Benbrook 21:19
No, you’re not. Let me just share with everyone watching this discussion. On the same day the Supreme Court dropped its ruling in favor of Bayer-Monsanto, President Trump signed a new executive order purportedly devoted to advancing regenerative agriculture. In this executive order there are three or four provisions that once again put the thumb of this administration and of the executive branch of government on the scales in favor of the Bayer-Monsanto position.

Chuck Benbrook 22:13
It’s unbelievable the degree to which Bayer-Monsanto was able to influence the USDA, the EPA, the White House, and the Department of Justice, who argued on Bayer-Monsanto’s behalf in front of the Supreme Court. The court system, state legislators, they’re everywhere, and using the same tactics, the same misinformation, and their money. They have a lot of money to share.

Chuck Benbrook 22:58
They are able like any profitable corporation or any wealthy person – you can use your money to get access and to gain influence by investing in the communication of your view of the facts. That’s exactly what Bayer-Monsanto has done. Bayer-Monsanto has like six or eight long-term close associates that are part of the Trump administration, including the chief of staff in the White House, Susie Wiles.

Chuck Benbrook 23:37
It’s really astounding how the tentacles of Bayer-Monsanto now are reaching into the very senior levels of the government, and they’re really orchestrating in Congress, in the courts, and in executive branch agencies like the USDA and EPA. This is an all-of-government campaign to shield them from their irresponsible behavior in how they tested and labeled and marketed Roundup. It’s just that simple.

Chuck Benbrook 21:18
They made these investments knowing that if they got a Supreme Court ruling like what was issued on Thursday, yesterday, it would be very good for business. As a matter of fact, it didn’t take very long. Bayer-Monsanto stock rose 17% on Thursday before they suspended trading to not let it go any higher. A 17% increase in Bayer’s market cap, you’re probably talking about $20 billion, so that’s a nice payday. Ironically, that’s about what the litigation has cost them in the last 10–11 years.

Dave Chapman 25:15
Yeah, they just made it back. Chuck, you didn’t quite finish, and I would like to hear about why it was that Trump’s executive order. He was committing $700 million to promote and support regenerative agriculture. Where’s the flaw in that? What went wrong?

Chuck Benbrook 25:41
This goes back to the $700 million that Secretary Rollins announced maybe three months ago for sustainable regenerative agriculture. Listen, Dave, this is pretty outrageous, that $700 million is the remaining $700 million that the Trump administration didn’t cut from the Biden administration’s investment in climate-friendly agriculture and sustainable agriculture.

Chuck Benbrook 26:23
As you know, the Biden administration increased the baseline for climate-friendly farming through a variety of USDA programs up to about $2.5 billion. In the early stages of the Trump administration, through DOGE, they cut most of that down to about $700 million through the EQIP program and the Conservation Stewardship Program, and then they announced that it’s their new investment in regenerative agriculture.

Chuck Benbrook 26:58
No, it’s not a new investment in regenerative agriculture; it’s the semblance, it’s the last of the big increase that the Biden administration put in place that the Trump administration cut. Not only that, if you read what in this executive order that Trump signed yesterday, if you read what they mean about regenerative agriculture, precision control technologies, no doubt more biotech.

Chuck Benbrook 27:42
Again, this is the same kind of smoothing out the rough edges of industrial agriculture to try to increase the efficiency of nitrogen use in corn from maybe 40% of the applied nitrogen getting into the corn plant to 47%, which will have not much of an impact on the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s tinkering around the edges of a failing system.

Chuck Benbrook 28:23
The thing about the Trump administration is that they have played the American public, the media, the Congress, and the NGO community as kind of incapable of understanding exactly what they’re doing. It’s amazing that they keep taking these positions, issuing these executive orders, vastly cutting budgets, and then claiming the fact that they left a little bit of a budget that they’ve increased spending as a sign of their commitment to an issue. It’s like, are they for real?

Chuck Benbrook 29:11
But unfortunately, one of the operating philosophies of the Trump administration from day one is, “If we do enough outrageous stuff across enough areas, there’s just no way people can keep track of it.” There’s no way that the public can organize and build up enough opposition through good old democratic procedures and processes, citizen involvement. The citizenry would have to spend all of their time protesting, but the general public has to make a living and raise kids and grow a crop.

Dave Chapman 29:59
Yeah. Because I know that some of the people listening won’t know about this. Could you just explain what precision control technology means? When they were saying that, in order to develop regenerative agriculture, they’re going to develop that. What does that mean?

Chuck Benbrook 30:21
They’re going to build electronic sensors into spray machines so that when the sprayer is going through the field, the sensor will tell where there’s a patch without weeds, and it won’t spray in that one area. It’s a precision technology, some of which is good and some of which can advance regenerative agriculture if it’s focused on making biologically based systems that work with the natural cycles that support food and farming on every farm in the world.

Chuck Benbrook 30:21
If precision ag and new technology was used to empower farmers to work with those natural interactions and systems, it’d be a positive thing, and food would become more nutritious, there’d be less chemicals, and there’d be lower cost for sure, but that’s not what industrial agriculture is talking about with precision technology.

Chuck Benbrook 31:32
They’re talking about information technology, AI, drones, new diagnostics to help farmers understand which pesticide or which animal drug to use on what parts of a field or for which animals. It’s to try to make the industrial system work a little better than it is now.

Dave Chapman 32:03
In the end, that money is actually going to strengthen the role of the chemicals made by Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta in our agricultural system. That’s such a big deal. I did not hear any mention from Trump or anybody else about the role of organic and all this.

Chuck Benbrook 32:28
Yeah, curious, isn’t it? They seem to steer clear of the O word. With all of my many friends in the organic community, farmers, business owners, retailers, I have tried to convince them that the biases against organic, spread throughout the policies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are so significant and so pervasive, and are manipulated like many little hammers that will ultimately break a dam.

Chuck Benbrook 33:21
I don’t know how to explain to people the importance of really forcing the USDA and the Congress to assure that there’s at least a level playing field. Right now, organic has so many more hoops that organic farmers have to jump through. The government does everything it can to not make it possible for organic farmers and food companies to explain to people how much healthier they’ll be if they decide to choose and consistently buy organic food, which is the big difference that explains the greater market penetration for organic in Europe as opposed to the U.S.

Chuck Benbrook 34:29
In most European countries, organic is treated as an alternative system, but it’s treated fairly. The science that is done, the testing that is done, is reported honestly to people. Consumers have made their minds up that when they can, they’re going to choose, particularly when they’re raising young children. They’re going to choose organic fruits and vegetables, grains, and dairy because the data shows that it’s healthier.

Chuck Benbrook 35:03
It is healthier, Dave. We don’t need any more research to make that general conclusion. Just like we don’t need any more research to say that there’s going to be more people killed and hurt in auto accidents that drive an average of 90 miles an hour compared to 60 miles an hour. Who would want to make that argument? It’s silly.

Chuck Benbrook 35:35
It’s a real problem, and the systemic disinvestment and discouragement of organic farming in the U.S. by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, despite all the great work when Kathleen Merrigan was Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, she tried. I assure you, she did everything in her power, and she had a fair amount of power as the number two person in USDA, but the institutional, legislative, and budgetary hurdles were just monumental.

Chuck Benbrook 36:16
Of course, now it’s, they’re way worse after almost two years into the second Trump administration, which is why I also feel that come January of 2029, when there will be a new administration, might be a Democratic president, might be a Republican president, and that actually might not make a huge difference in terms of the public support and pressure to start to deal with these systemic problems in U.S. agriculture and in the food industry that are basically making Americans sick.

Chuck Benbrook 37:03
We have an unhealthy food system. We are growing food in unhealthy ways. It’s just so hard for many of the people that I work with, that are aware of the science and have been aware of the science for 10 years, 20 years, that there’s really been no response by government to actually make food safer.

Chuck Benbrook 37:37
Now along comes this Supreme Court decision, and not only does it not make food safer, but it’s going to make it a lot easier for the pesticide industry to avoid accountability when it turns out that one of their products does cause cancer, or does kill bees, or pollute the groundwater in a state to where all of the water districts in Iowa have to put in a fancy new filtration system.

Chuck Benbrook 38:11
Not just to take atrazine out, they’ve already spent the money to put in systems to remove the triazine herbicides, but who knows what future herbicides they may have to figure out a way to filter out of the drinking water of Iowa, unless they want to accept the steady increase in cancer that’s happening across that state.

Dave Chapman 39:29
Yeah, they’re competing to be first in cancer. They’re still only in second place, but they’re going up quickly.

Chuck Benbrook 38:45
Dave, there is some reason for hope. The combination of the MAHA movement and other people that have been working on pesticides for a long time created the political messaging and clout, really, to defeat the failure-to-warn amendment in the House, and it was by six or seven votes or something. That vote was as unexpected and, in a way, shocking as the IARC in 2015 classifying glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

Chuck Benbrook 39:54
Yesterday on a podcast after the Supreme Court decision came out, both Representative Pingree, one of the leading members of the House, one of my Congresswomen from Maine, and Cory Booker, Senator from New Jersey, they both said they are going to work on crafting a small bill to try to get into the Farm Bill, the still alive Farm Bill that may or may not pass Congress this year, to fix the ambiguities in FIFRA that led to this Supreme Court decision.

Dave Chapman 39:33
Okay, explain what FIFRA is for people.

Chuck Benbrook 40:24
It’s the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. It’s the foundational legislation that has created the pesticide regulatory system that we use in the U.S.

Dave Chapman 40:34
Is that administered by EPA, or is that a separate…?

Chuck Benbrook 40:42
It’s administrated almost all aspects of it by the EPA in the office.

Dave Chapman 40:47
Okay, the EPA ought to define its legal guidance.

Chuck Benbrook 40:53
Correct. Yeah, its mandate. What does the law say we’re supposed to do, and what tools does the law give us to achieve those objectives. This is the heart of the debate and sort of the crisis that has come about because of this Supreme Court decision. The FIFRA statute says that pesticides have to be registered and labeled by the EPA, and that they can’t be misbranded. They can’t contain a label that is untruthful or unclear or inconsistent with some requirement of the statute, which kind of makes sense. It’s widely known that the label is the law.

Chuck Benbrook 40:53
When you buy a pesticide, or any farmer buys a pesticide, or anybody with bugs in their garbage, you have to apply it consistent with the instructions on the label, or you’re actually breaking the law and could be subject to an enforcement action.

Chuck Benbrook 41:13
What Bayer-Monsanto argued is that whatever is on that EPA label, the EPA-proof label, that has to be regarded as all that any pesticide company would ever have to do to comply with the statute. In other words, an EPA-labeled product can’t be misbranded.

Chuck Benbrook 41:31
If the companies get EPA to approve a label, then the companies can really argue, and they have argued over and over, that because EPA reviewed all the science behind the label, all of the provisions on the label, the use instructions, that means that EPA has made a judgment that the use of the pesticide in accord with the label is safe. That is the position that they sold to the Supreme Court and got the majority in the Supreme Court to accept.

Chuck Benbrook 41:10
How does it play out in the Durnell case? The Roundup herbicides that John Durnell bought in his Home Depot didn’t have a cancer warning on it. So Bayer-Monsanto got this to the Supreme Court by saying, “EPA never approved a cancer warning or never required a cancer warning, therefore we Bayer-Monsanto, the manufacturer of the product, we can’t be sued in a state court for not warning about it.”

Dave Chapman 41:39
There’s some sense to that, except they actually knew differently, didn’t they?

Chuck Benbrook 43:58
Right. This is one of the key things. If one assumes that the FIFRA statute and all of its provisions, some of which are pretty complicated, are fairly and equitably implemented and adhered to, and that the companies fulfill their obligations specified in the statute and do it honestly and don’t try to spin data, don’t try to bury negative studies, don’t try to ruin the careers of scientists that publish research raising questions about their products.

Chuck Benbrook 44:53
In other words, don’t do all the things that Bayer-Monsanto has been doing for 40 years – if none of that was true, if the companies did good science and honestly reported it, and all of the provisions in the FIFRA statute were adhered to, there would be a certain credibility in that argument.

Chuck Benbrook 45:19
But the problem is, that’s just not the way the real world works. We know that pesticide companies have a repeated history of doing poor science, even fraudulent science. We know that they always spin results of anybody’s science on their products to make their products look as good as possible. Those realities of the way companies behave in the real world are evident in technicolor in the case of Roundup and Bayer-Monsanto, and of course that’s the evidence that was presented to the jury.

Chuck Benbrook 46:12
When juries found in favor of Roundup non-Hodgkin lymphoma plaintiffs like John Durnell, they did it in part because they had become convinced from the record and the evidence presented to them, which is mostly testimony from Bayer-Monsanto scientists and regulatory officials and their internal communications, that they knew Roundup posed a risk of cancer, they knew it was genotoxic, and they did everything to bury, obfuscate, and make other people not look under those rocks, not take the next step in better understanding how Roundup increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Chuck Benbrook 47:03
The juries heard years of this behavior, and they said, “Well, wait a minute. They knew enough, maybe Roundup doesn’t cause cancer, but there was enough evidence suggesting that they should at least have said, ‘Hey, wear gloves when you apply Roundup.'”

Chuck Benbrook 47:22
Is that such an onerous burden to impose on people? Put a warning on that. If you’re a long-term user and you spray it a lot, you need to be extra careful to minimize your exposures, because you’re getting exposed often and for a long period of time. They should have put those kinds of precautionary statements and warnings on the label, certainly 20 years ago, that there was enough science then for that, but they didn’t.

Chuck Benbrook 48:00
But all of these realities about the way that Bayer-Monsanto represented the risks of Roundup to regulators, influenced the independent scientific community, influenced the media, influenced politicians, all of that was out of sight, out of mind in the Supreme Court and among the majority.

Chuck Benbrook 48:29
They put no weight on it. In Justice Kavanaugh’s explanation of the basis for the majority’s opinion, he ignored all of the evidence in the record and in the amicus briefs to the Supreme Court about how the system actually is working. That’s a shame.

Dave Chapman 49:00
Chuck, you’ve said to me in an earlier conversation that the opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was very powerful and very eloquent. Could you just speak about that eloquence? What was it that she said that really struck you?

Chuck Benbrook 49:21
She and Justice Gorsuch joined her. It’s basically as long as Kavanaugh’s. It very clearly walks through the holes in Kavanaugh’s arguments, but even more important, the dissent addresses these other issues. For example, the dissent – and this is the first time I’ve seen it in a document as important as a Supreme Court order – there are three or four sentences in there where she says, “EPA spends really no attention and has no authority designed to help it deal with chronic risks like risk for cancer from long-term exposures.”

Chuck Benbrook 50:24
She’s making the point that so much of what FIFRA requires and what goes on the label is intended to make sure that people that are handling and applying the pesticide don’t get a big enough exposure to be poisoned. Of course, if you’re applying an acutely toxic organophosphate or carbamate insecticide, you definitely have to be careful. Or paraquat, very small exposures to paraquat can make you very sick or kill you. That point is made.

Chuck Benbrook 51:05
Another thing that the dissent did that I was really surprised by is they did some of their own original research on what EPA had actually approved, and there’s passages in the dissent that show that in several instances the EPA has allowed companies to put in a label amendment that includes a warning about cancer, including about glyphosate, and EPA said fine.

Chuck Benbrook 51:39
They didn’t challenge that, and the reason is that the FIFRA statute and an EPA regulation say the chemical companies can put anything on their label that makes their product safer. They’re not going to evaluate the science on it. They hope you’re right. They hope it does make your product safer.

Chuck Benbrook 52:04
The only time Monsanto wants to change something on its label, like if they want to increase the maximum rate of application from one pound to a pound and a half, if EPA believes that that 50% jump in the application rate will increase exposures, increase risk, lead to more aquatic insect harm, etc., then it will evaluate the science, whether their science supports that increase or whether that increase will move enough of the applications of Roundup into the zone of unreasonable adverse effects on man or the environment.

Chuck Benbrook 52:49
That’s the trigger for pesticide registrations that create unreasonable adverse effects on man or the environment. Those are not legal, and a product that does that is misbranded.

Dave Chapman 53:12
This was a really upsetting thing to me yesterday, I got to say. I knew it was coming. I always believed that the Supreme Court was going to side with Bayer-Monsanto, but it really upset me. It really disturbed me to see the government once again siding against the people and for all the corporations.

Chuck Benbrook 53:39
Yeah, there’s no sugarcoating, Dave. This is a historically significant change in policy, probably equivalent to the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act in 1996, which had a big, major, and positive impact on EPA regulatory decision-making. This is a step backward that’s certainly comparable in scope.

Chuck Benbrook 54:12
We have no idea. Even people like me, that have been tracking this for decades, the industry is going to exploit this ruling and the precedents that are embedded in it in all sorts of areas: animal drugs, PFAS, medications, water pollution, air pollution. This ruling by the Supreme Court is a monumental shift in federal law and jurisprudence that none of us can begin to imagine the consequences of.

Chuck Benbrook 54:59
It’s going to make it much harder for people that feel that we can do a better job of managing chemicals, that we can grow food that’s safer. We don’t need to apply four or five pounds of pesticides on the average farm acre. We really don’t need to do that, but it’s going to make it much harder now to change the policies and the laws and the programs that affect how food is grown and what’s done with it in a positive way. It’s a big setback for public health.

Dave Chapman 55:44
All right, Chuck. I have been a little bit stunned leading up to this that the media was by and large ignoring this case. They kept saying, “There are big cases coming up,” and I thought, “This is a big case.” You and I both see that it is. I want to thank you, because I know that you’ve been fighting a good fight for a very long time, and you’re still fighting it.

Dave Chapman 56:09
You said that your phone rang this morning. First it was Shelley’s office, and then it was Booker’s office, and everyone was like, “We have to get together. We got to talk about this.”

Chuck Benbrook 56:22
Yeah. As I said, Senator Booker and Representative Pingree were on this podcast this afternoon. I just watched it, and they both said, “We’re going to try to get a legislative fix into the Farm Bill,” which I think is very unlikely. But you have to work at it. You have to start that ball rolling. I applaud them for that, and I’m going to help them in any way I can.

Dave Chapman 56:46
That’s right. I hope that we all help them, and everyone is paying more and more attention to what’s in the Farm Bill, and what the government is doing, and what the EPA is doing, because, as you say, it’s going the wrong way, and we got to bring it back.

Chuck Benbrook 57:04
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 57:04
Chuck Benbrook, thank you so much for jumping in with me today, and we’re going to have this out, we hope, Tuesday.

Chuck Benbrook 57:04
Okay. Thank you very much, Dave.

Dave Chapman 57:11
Alright.