Since that initial spike of corticosteroid positives in the first 73 days of the drug testing contract, the NMRC has issued 25 more rulings to trainers for corticosteroid overages through early February 2019.

REPRINTED COURTESEY PaulickReport.com—Change is never easy, even when it's for the better. Horsemen and officials in New Mexico have been learning that the hard way over the past few months.

In June 2018, the New Mexico Racing Commission (NMRC) began a new drug testing contract with a new laboratory and, almost immediately, saw a rise in corticosteroid overages. In the 685 days before the switch, New Mexico had 52 corticosteroid overages. In the first 73 days of the new contract, it had 34.

The New Mexico Horsemen's Association (NMHA) grew suspicious and called in experts to figure out what went wrong. At a public meeting in late November, drug testing experts Drs. Thomas Tobin and Rick Sams, together with racetrack veterinarians Drs. Clara Fenger, Clayton McCook, and Paul Jenson presented their analysis.

The spike, the group concluded, was not likely due to a change in veterinarians' protocols, and it wasn't ineptitude on the part of the previous laboratory. The answer was more complex than that, and made it difficult for anyone to decide who was at fault for the rash of positive tests.

Prior to last summer, New Mexico had contracted with the Kenneth L Maddy Equine Analytical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of California-Davis. In June, NMRC began a new contract with Industrial Laboratories in Wheat Ridge, Colo. Both are accredited by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, and were both among the first to do so. Theoretically then, the capabilities of the labs were the same. What changed, Sams and Tobin agreed, were the instructions in the contract NMRC signed.

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