ARCI RULE WOULD PUT TRAINERS, VETS, ON THE HOOK FOR ﾓEXCESSIVEﾔ OVERAGES

The most egregious abusers of performance-enhancing equine drugs and those who load up on supposedly therapeutic medication regimens might soon face more intense scrutiny and the threat of drastic penalization based on a new rule modeled on whole-horse health that is being drafted by the Association of Racing Commissioners International (ARCI). 

In addition to the traditional United States system of imposing penalties based on established threshold overages, the ARCI wants to give state racing commissions a tool to go after the human connections of any horse found to have been “excessively” administered any substance. 

The ARCI aims to do this by requiring trainers and veterinarians to prove, as a defense, that their actions did not actually endanger the welfare of the horse. 

According to the proposed new rule that is posted and open to public comment on the ARCI website, penalization for pharmaceutically endangering an equine would consist of four levels: 

(a) A violation of this rule shall constitute a class B violation; (b) A gross violation of this rule shall constitute a class A violation with a minimum mandatory license suspension of 10 years; (c) The horse shall be disqualified from any race and lose any purse; (d) The horse shall be ineligible to enter or race unless the trainer demonstrates to the satisfaction of the racing commission that the excessive administration will have no potential effect on racing performance. 

The “gross violation” that would trigger a 10-year penalty is defined in part as “excessive administration of a substance that rises to the level of an egregious deviation from the standards of acceptable veterinary practice. This may occur not only when a single excessive administration is of egregious proportions, but also when multiple acts of excessive administration” cumulatively amount to egregious conduct. 

“This approach is not tied to proving a threshold,” ARCI president Ed Martin told TDN. “This approach is tied to being able to prove that somebody has done something way beyond the acceptable norm of veterinary practice. If you're going to depart from normal veterinary practice absent the science that what you're doing is safe, you're basically exposing yourself [to penalization].” 

The ARCI Model Rules Committee will discuss and possibly amend this proposal when it next meets July 15. It would then be up to individual state racing commissions to adopt and enforce the rule. 

“The Jockey Club supports any movement that aims to impose severe and uniform penalties, up to and including a lifetime ban from the sport, for anyone who illegally administers drugs or substances to a horse,” Jim Gagliano, president and chief operating officer of The Jockey Club, said. “While there is widespread consensus that repeat violators should receive meaningful penalties, only 9 of 38 racing jurisdictions have adopted the multiple medication violations schedule of the National Uniform Medication Program.” 

Racing regulators worldwide have been searching for ways to keep abreast with drug cheats, who, unlike enforcement agencies, don't wait for science-based evidence before trying out new doping regimens on horses. 

Currently, for emerging substances for which no rules or thresholds have been set, horsemen can dose as high as they want without fear of punishment. For testing levels that are regulated, trainers and veterinarians can try and skirt penalization by titrating doses to remain just under the penalty level. 

One regulatory approach to thwart this type of drug abuse that has gained favor over the past year or so has been an attempt to combat excessive substance administration by writing new regulations (or enforcing already existing rules) that broadly treat beyond-norm pharmaceutical dosing as a horse endangerment problem. 

“Those who run afoul of generally accepted veterinary practices by giving drugs or substances to a horse with no regard as the effect on the health of the horse…will be on the hot seat as a result of this approach,” Duncan Patterson, chairman of the ARCI Drug Testing Standards and Practices Committee, explained in an ARCI press release. 

“It's an issue we have been struggling with for a number of years,” Martin said. “It's a creative legal attempt to be able to impact [drug abuse]. 

“The concept was developed by regulatory attorneys in our network,” Martin continued. “It's an attempt to get out in front of certain issues. In the past we've needed to wait for research and threshold recommendations to be developed and enacted. The attractiveness of this approach is that it creates a legal framework [in which] if we find [drug administration] at levels that raise the eyebrows of our regulatory veterinarians, then we have a way to legally deal with that.” 

Martin said the proposal was developed in part after recent commission tests revealed that some horses had cobalt levels 50 to 100 times higher than what would be considered “normal,” even after accounting for routine vitamin administrations. These horses were believed to have been injected with cobalt chloride, and the test results caused regulatory veterinarians to question the effects on the health of those horses. 

“I know that there were instances in Minnesota last year where they found some extremely elevated levels of cobalt, and the only recourse was to put the horse on the vet's list,” Martin said. “If a legal approach had been on the books like what is being discussed [by the proposed new rule], it might have created a regulatory avenue by which somebody would have to 'do some explaining,' to use an expression.” 

Martin said other ARCI model rules in the pipeline might be based on taking advantage of existing accountability standards that are already on the books in the form of state veterinary statutes. 

“State veterinary boards can be a potential resource to state racing commissions in terms of providing an expertise as to what constitutes normal and appropriate veterinary care,” Martin said. “In those instances in which there has been a departure, such as people using things on horses in amounts that would constitute a concern about an overdose or experimentation, we then would have a way to aggressively deal with that.” 

Martin underscored that certain regulations–most specifically the long-standing “trainer responsibility rule,” initially designed to hold trainers solely accountable, but now being abused as a loophole to exclude other responsible caretakers–might be ripe for revision. 

“There are some people who feel that owners, and in some cases veterinarians, are getting a free pass because of the trainer responsibility rule,” said Martin. 

“There are so many moving parts in racing that you need to make sure all the checks and balances are working the way they need to,” Martin said. “It's not unreasonable to come back and review some of these things that we've done in the past to find better ways to do them.”