A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit led by Smart Approaches to Marijuana challenging the Trump administration’s Medicare-linked CBD program, finding the plaintiffs failed to show they had standing to bring the case.
Judge Trevor N. McFadden, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed the case Friday, finding that SAM, MMJ International Holdings, its subsidiaries and the other plaintiffs failed to meet the basic requirement needed to sue in federal court.
SAM and its allies had asked the court to halt a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services program connected to hemp-derived CBD access for certain Medicare patients. The challenge had been placed on an expedited track after the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint and again asked for emergency court intervention.
“Each claims an injury too abstract or too remote to open the courtroom doors,” McFadden wrote.
Rather than weighing the broader legal claims raised in the lawsuit, McFadden said the case could not proceed because the plaintiffs did not establish Article III standing.
“At the outset, the Court notes that it need not tackle the bulk of questions that Plaintiffs raise in their motions,” McFadden wrote. “That is because Plaintiffs’ case suffers from a fatal flaw: the failure to establish Article III standing to bring their claims. The Court addresses only this jurisdictional hole and will dismiss the entire suit and deny Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction as moot.”
Because of that finding, the court did not rule on whether the plaintiffs were entitled to a preliminary injunction. McFadden instead concluded that the alleged harms outlined by the plaintiffs were not concrete enough to keep the lawsuit alive.
The case was brought by SAM, allied prohibitionist organizations, individual activists and MMJ International Holdings, a cannabis-focused biopharmaceutical company. The plaintiffs claimed the program raised legal and public health concerns, but McFadden found their alleged injuries were too distant from the policy to support federal jurisdiction.
The decision is a major loss for opponents of the Medicare-linked CBD policy, which has drawn attention as President Donald Trump’s administration moves to expand medical marijuana and cannabidiol (CBD) research and access.
Sponsored
