Recent Baffert decision underscores problems posed by national hodgepodge of medication regulations

For decades, breeders have advocated a regimen of hay, oats, and water on the racetrack. As articulated by breeders and their representatives, a racehorse free of any external influence such as therapeutic medications is the only way to assure the sport's integrity.

Without question, integrity is a keystone of the sport, but breeders also have a sound business reason for wanting horses that have not raced on such medications as phenylbutazone or furosemide. Without medications, breeders would have a clearer picture of the soundness and pulmonary-bleeding status of prospective stallions and broodmares.

Anyone who has been around racing for the past quarter-century is well aware that the hay, oats, and water crowd has lost this battle, as one by one the barriers to permissive medication rules have fallen. In some ways, permissiveness created a new set of problems for racetrack horsemen.

When no medication was permitted, a positive drug test was a black or white issue. Current regulations, however, effectively are speed limits. If a horse has less than a certain level of Bute in its system, for instance, the drug's presence is not regarded as a positive. Over the limit, you get a ticket and sit out a few weeks.

The underlying principle is that specific therapeutic levels of medication have no effect physiologically on the horse. The principle is a good one, but its execution in the racing industry has been woeful.

The biggest problem has been regulators in charge of enforcement who have approached medication rules like cops making a drug bust. Rather than looking at a trainer as a businessman trying to keep a horse both healthy and economically productive, the enforcers (some of whom were cops) treated them no differently than street drug peddlers.

Of course, street drugs sometimes are discovered, and the finding of trace levels of morphine in one of trainer Bob Baffert's horses led to a significant decision last month against the California Horse Racing Board, which had sought to ban the trainer for 60 days. The federal court decision to throw out the positive was based on a technicality, that California and its test laboratory had destroyed potentially exculpatory evidence and therefore had violated Baffert's constitutional rights.

For Baffert and his attorney, Neil Papiano, the decision was a vindication, but it undoubtedly was an expensive one. As the nation's leading trainer by purses won in 2001, Baffert is in a better position to afford the legal bills that were necessary to fight it.

Baffert won, but the system is not fixed. Moreover, the logic of the situation has not been addressed. Would Baffert risk a multimillion-dollar business by putting a dab of morphine on a horse's tongue? Surely not, but in essence he-regarded as the absolute insurer-was convicted for that offense in an administrative hearing.

In horse racing, everyone cares about integrity and control of both permitted and illegal medications. Everyone, it seems, has a plan, with the Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association recently joining the Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association, among others, with a plan for regulating medications.

But when everyone has a plan, no one has a plan. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association has addressed drug testing and industry integrity, and it needs to take the lead toward a logical, predictable system. To that end, it needs to convene a summit of the sport's fractured regulators-members of the Association of Racing Commissioners International and the North American Pari-Mutuel Regulators Association-to develop national standards for medication positives.

When? The sooner the better. After assessing scientific information and distilling the data into regulations, the racing commissioners then need to do the hard work, which is to go back to their home states and get the regulations approved.

Logic demands that the standard for a positive should be therapeutic effectiveness. The same standard should apply to illegal medications such as morphine or cocaine, which often are environmental contaminants.

Of course, no one has sought to answer the question: Where did the morphine or cocaine come from? That is the big question, and no one in racing really wants to tackle that one. But that is a topic for another day.