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Mid-Atlantic States Move to Restrict Use of Clenbuterol

Continuing a decades-long regional effort to enact uniform medication, safety and welfare reforms, protocols and rules, a coalition of 31 regulatory and stakeholder organizations representing all seven states in the Mid-Atlantic region have unanimously agreed to work together to implement a new rule that will significantly restrict the improper use of the bronchodilator clenbuterol.

Under the current regional rule, clenbuterol may not be administered to a horse within 14 days of a race, and the concentration of the drug in a post-race blood sample may not exceed 140 picograms/ml. The new rule will eliminate the existing testing threshold, require regulatory approval in advance for a horse in racing or training that is prescribed the medication, mandate that the horse be placed on the Veterinarian’s List, and bar the horse from racing until it tests negative in both blood and urine and completes a satisfactory workout observed by a regulatory veterinarian.

The move to restrict the use of clenbuterol in racing was made during a Mid-Atlantic Zoom meeting held Oct. 15. The meeting was attended by more than 60 stakeholder leaders from the seven states and regulatory jurisdictions that have committed to the Mid-Atlantic Strategic Plan to Reduce Equine Fatalities. During this meeting, New York State Gaming Commission Equine Medical Director Dr. Scott Palmer presented data collected from a recent out-of-competition sampling program. Dr. Palmer indicated that the Commission required all horses trained by federally indicted individuals to submit to hair testing for prohibited and impermissible substances prior to those horses being allowed to return to racing.

“The Commission’s hair testing review found that clenbuterol was administered to a substantial number of these horses without evidence of a medical prescription,” Dr. Palmer said. “In addition to being a useful therapeutic medication to treat respiratory disease, clenbuterol has re-partitioning effects that can enhance muscle development. Clenbuterol should not be administered to racehorses without a legitimate treatment plan and a proper diagnosis. This new rule will eliminate the improper use of clenbuterol.”

Maryland began their rule-making process on Oct. 22 and will apply the new restricted rule to both Thoroughbred and Standardbred racehorses. New York plans to propose a rule amendment in November. The other jurisdictions will follow suit, navigating the regulatory process necessary for enactment in each state for racing in 2021.

“The Mid-Atlantic’s collective work has spearheaded significant industry medication reforms over the years, including the bans on steroids in 2008 and, most recently, the use of bisphosphonates in 2019 and thyroid supplementation earlier this year. The region’s Uniform Medication and Drug Testing Program in 2014 ultimately became the National Uniform Medication Program. Everyone in the region, including regulators, racetrack operators, horsemen, breeders and veterinarians, is committed to the implementation of the Strategic Plan to Reduce Equine Fatalities. Working together, we have made, and continue to make, real change,” said Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association Chairman Alan Foreman, who has facilitated the Mid-Atlantic meetings since their inception.

The new clenbuterol rule is as follows:

Clenbuterol use is prohibited in racing and training unless the following conditions are met:
The prescription for clenbuterol is made for a specific horse based upon a specific diagnosis. The prescription and volume dispensed cannot exceed a treatment period of 30 days.
The veterinarian must provide a copy of the prescription and diagnosis to the Equine Medical Director for review and approval. The horse may not receive clenbuterol before this approval is issued.
Trainers must make daily notification to the official veterinarian of horse(s) in their custody having been administered clenbuterol. Notification shall be made on a form and by a deadline designated by the Commission.
A horse administered clenbuterol shall be placed on the official Veterinarian’s List. The horse must meet all conditions for removal from the list including a timed workout and blood and urine sampling. Both samples must have no detectable clenbuterol.
A horse may not enter to race until it has completed all the requirements in subdivision (d).
If clenbuterol is detected in a horse’s post-race or out-of-competition sample and appropriate notification as outlined in subdivision 1(a) or (b) was not completed, the horse shall immediately be placed on the Official Veterinarian’s List pending the outcome of an investigation. The horse shall be required to meet all conditions for removal from the Veterinarian’s List outlined in subdivision 1(d), above.

The Mid-Atlantic stakeholders and regulators who have committed to the Strategic Plan include Delaware Park, DTHA, Delaware Racing Commission, Maryland Jockey Club, Maryland State Fair (Timonium), MTHA, Maryland Racing Commission, Maryland Horse Breeders Association, Monmouth Park, NJTHA, New Jersey Racing Commission, New Jersey Thoroughbred Breeders Association, Finger Lakes Racetrack, Finger Lakes HBPA, NYTHA, New York State Gaming Commission, New York Thoroughbred Breeders Inc., Penn National Gaming, Parx Racing, Presque Isle Downs, PTHA, Pennsylvania HBPA, Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission, Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association, Colonial Downs, Virginia Racing Commission, Charles Town, Mountaineer Park, Charles Town HBPA, Mountaineer HBPA, West Virginia Racing Commission, and the National Steeplechase Association.

Click here for a copy of the Strategic Plan.

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Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act Passes House

By a unanimous Sep. 29 voice vote, the United States House of Representatives passed a years-in-the-making bill that, if eventually signed into law, will develop and implement anti-doping, medication control, drug testing, and racetrack safety standard programs enforced by an independent authority whose powers would supersede the long-standing state-by-state regulation of the sport.

HR 1754, which has existed in various proposed forms since 2015 and was amended Sep. 9 to match the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA) companion legislation that got introduced in the U.S. Senate that same day, passed on Tuesday after five members of Congress from both parties spoke in favor of it while no representatives voiced objections. The Senate version of the HISA (SB 4547) does not currently appear on the near-term calendar of that chamber for voting. But it was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who determines which items come up for action, and McConnell has previously indicated he’s strongly in favor of a vote happening prior to the end of the current legislative session.

McConnell’s press office issued a laudatory statement after the House’s passage that did not indicate a timetable for a Senate vote, only noting that “work continues to pass this bill into law.”

If the HISA next passes the Senate, President Donald Trump would then have the opportunity to sign it into law.

The House was meeting Tuesday under a “suspension of the rules” session that is routinely employed a way to speed up voting when a large number of bills have bipartisan support and do not appear to face any objections from voting lawmakers. Debate time is limited to 40 minutes and no amendments can be offered in a rules-suspended Congressional setting.

HR 1754 was one of 26 bills up for discussion in this manner Tuesday, and although no formal vote count was tallied, it was clear from the strong chorus of “ayes” without a single dissenting vote that the measure received the required two-thirds support to be passed.

The low-key, matter-of-fact passage on Tuesday lacked any of the polarizing discourse that has defined the controversial measure within the sport over the past half-decade.

Although numerous industry organizations, including The Jockey Club, the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, various horse-health coalitions, and a number of top-tier racetracks have supported passage of the Integrity Act, other entities, including the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association and the Association of Racing Commissioners International, have spoken out against it, claiming at times that their input has not been sought or considered as the legislation has been crafted.

The passage with nary a dissenting House vote on Tuesday also marks a stunning turnaround for a bill that GovTrack (a legislative transparency organization that uses logistic regression analysis to rank the likelihood of passage of the 10,000 bills that come up annually in Congress) once gave only a 2% chance of being enacted back in 2015.

The five Congress people who spoke in favor during Tuesday’s debate session testified mostly in general terms while advocating for the bill’s passage, and at times even lapsed into congratulatory language before the voice vote came back affirmative, taking the time to thank long lists of industry and governmental supporters.

There was no mention of the nuts-and-bolts implementation of the HISA, nor any detail-oriented talk about one of its most important concessions that helped to achieve a recent degree of compromise: the phasing-out of race-day medications, instead of banning them outright, like previous versions of the bill had sought to do.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ), who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which had advanced the amended the bill to the House floor by a 46-5 vote, stressed the need for uniformity in the sport’s oversight that he said can only be achieved by doing away with the current model of disparate regulation in which rules are set by the 38 individual states that allow pari-mutuel horse racing.

“The bill establishes uniform standards for medication and anti-doping control, and racetrack safety for Thoroughbred horse racing,” Pallone said. “This will help ensure that we can maintain a safe, thriving horse racing industry. It also applies stronger safeguards and enforcement against performance-enhancing drugs [PEDs]. For a sport in which fans place billions of dollars of bets, trust in the authenticity of competition is crucial. The very legitimacy of the sport is undermined if the competitors and public cannot trust that all racehorses are competing on a level playing field.”

Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY), who has co-sponsored three different versions of the Integrity Act (including the current amended version), framed the House’s passage of the bill as an opportunity to lock in a better future for horse racing.

“That patchwork system simply doesn’t work. This national approach brings great hope to the integrity of this great industry. If horse racing is to thrive as an industry and once again capture the public’s imagination, we must do better,” Tonko said.

Tonko explained how the new board of the independent authority would include “voices representing a spectrum of perspectives within the horse racing industry.” Yet he also stated how representation on that board would be “subject to strict conflict of interest rules.” He did not offer specifics on how to achieve that difficult balance of inclusion and objectivity.

Several representatives who spoke in favor of the bill referenced an honor roll of America’s great racehorses when championing for passage of the HISA. Yet Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) spoke instead about the raw economics of the horse industry, which he said contributes between $26 billion and $50 billion (depending on the estimate source) in direct economic impact to the U.S. economy, while employing 988,394 workers.

“Advocating for this industry requires more than just celebrating its proud heritage,” Barr said. “I’ve always believed that the future prosperity of this sport depends on uniformity of the rules of racing.”

Barr, who co-chairs the Congressional Horse Caucus and who, in conjunction with Tonko, has co-sponsored three versions of Integrity Act, said that the current lack of uniformity “has impeded interstate commerce. It has compromised the international competitiveness of the industry. It has undermined public confidence in the safety and integrity of the sport, and the industry is in desperate need of certainty.”

Barr continued: “As a conservative who believes in federalism and states’ rights, I nevertheless understand that the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce precisely for the purpose of eliminating these kinds of impediments to interstate exchange. And as I’ve said many times as a limited government conservative, this legislation is not about more regulation. It is about creating a single, nationwide set of rules that will result in smarter, more effective, and streamlined regulation for the industry.”

Barr said McConnell’s version of the bill that the House adopted “materially improves on our previous versions by adding a focus on track surface safety and by making reasonable, minor changes that have enabled us to enlarge our coalition of support.”

“I appreciate the willingness of all constituencies within the industry to compromise and to forge a consensus product,” Barr concluded. “This was not easy. But it was necessary to get us to this day [and to] enable the industry to attract a new generation of fans and investors to strengthen the Thoroughbred breed.”

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Two Defendants in Federal Indictment Plead Guilty to Doping Charges

Scott Robinson and Sarah Izhaki each pled guilty today to conspiring to unlawfully distribute adulterated and misbranded drugs for the purpose of doping racehorses. Robinson pled guilty before U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken, and will be sentenced by Judge Oetken Jan. 15, 2021. Izhaki pled guilty before U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, and will be sentenced by Judge Vyskocil Dec. 2, 2020. The guilty pleas are the first major domino to fall from the bombshell FBI indictments that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York dropped in March, which included charges against high-profile trainers Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro.

“Scott Robinson and Sarah Izhaki represent the supply side of a market of greed that continues to endanger racehorses through the sale of performance-enhancing drugs,” said Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Each of these defendants provided the raw materials for fraud and animal abuse through the sale of unregulated and dangerous substances: Robinson’s products were manufactured in shoddy facilities with no professional oversight of their composition; Izhaki’s products were smuggled into the country and sold from cars in supermarket parking lots. These convictions show that our office and our partners at the FBI are committed to the prosecution and investigation of corruption, fraud, and endangerment in the horse racing industry.”

According to the Indictments, from at least in or about 2011 through at least in or about March, 2020, Robinson conspired with others to manufacture, sell, and ship millions of dollars’ worth of adulterated and misbranded equine drugs, including performance-enhancing drugs intended to be administered to racehorses for the purpose of improving those horses’ race performance in order to win races and obtain prize money. Robinson sold these drugs through several direct-to-consumer websites designed to appeal to racehorse trainers and owners, including, among others, “horseprerace.com.”

Robinson contributed to the conspiracy by, among other things, sourcing chemicals used to create custom PEDs that were advertised and sold; falsely labeling, packaging, and shipping those PEDs to customers across the country, including in the Southern District of New York; and collecting, reporting, and responding to employee and customer complaints regarding the misbranded and adulterated products advertised and sold online. Among the drugs advertised and sold during the course of the conspiracy were “blood builders,” which are used by racehorse trainers and others to increase red blood cell counts and/or the oxygenation of muscle tissue of a racehorse in order to stimulate the horse’s endurance, which enhances that horse’s performance in, and recovery from, a race, as well as customized analgesics which are used by racehorse trainers and others to deaden a horse’s nerves and block pain in order to improve a horse’s race performance. The drugs distributed through the defendants’ websites were manufactured in non-FDA registered facilities and carried significant risks to the animals affected through the administration of those illicit PEDs.

For example, in 2016, Robinson received a complaint regarding the effect of his unregulated drugs on a customer’s horse: “starting bout 8 hours after I give the injection and for about 36 hours afterwards both my horses act like they are heavily sedated, can barely walk. Could I have a bad bottle of medicine, I’m afraid to give it anymore since this has happened three times.” Commenting on this complaint, Robinson wrote simply, “here is another one.”

In a separate conspiracy, from at least in or about February, 2018, through at least in or about November, 2019, Izhaki conspired with others to transport, sell, and deliver, tens of thousands of dollars of erythropoietin, a “blood builder” drug intended to increase a horse’s racing performance, which had been smuggled into the country from Mexico. This drug was covertly transported into the U.S. and sold by Izhaki, who believed it would be used by racehorse trainers to illicitly improve their horses’ race performance. Izhaki also offered for sale amphetamines, and a substance that Izhaki referred to as “the Devil,” which Izhaki claimed would mask the presence of potent drugs in a human or animal’s body.

The defendants are among 27 individuals charged in a series of Indictments arising from an investigation of a widespread scheme by racehorse trainers, veterinarians, PED distributors, and others to manufacture, distribute, and receive adulterated and misbranded PEDs and to secretly administer those PEDs to racehorses competing at all levels of professional horseracing. By evading PED prohibitions and deceiving regulators and horse racing officials, participants in these schemes sought to improve race performance and obtain prize money from racetracks, all to the detriment and risk of the health and well-being of the racehorses.

Robinson, 46, of Tampa, Fl., and Izhaki, 45, of Manalapan, N.J, each pled guilty to one count of conspiring to unlawfully introduce and receive with the intent to redistribute for pay or otherwise adulterated and misbranded drugs in interstate commerce, and to misbrand drugs in interstate commerce. This offense carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by the judge.

Strauss praised the outstanding investigative work of the FBI New York Office’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force and its support of the Bureau’s Integrity in Sports and Gaming Initiative. Strauss also thanked the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, the New York State Police, and the New York City Police Department for their support of this investigation, and the Food and Drug Administration and Drug Enforcement Administration for their assistance and expertise.

This case is being handled by the Office’s Money Laundering and Transnational Criminal Enterprises Unit. Assistant United States Attorneys Sarah Mortazavi, Benet J. Kearney, and Andrew C. Adams are in charge of the prosecution.

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