Bettors and racing fans may not notice much, if anything, different about the sport on Monday. The horses will race counterclockwise around the track, and the first one to the wire will be declared the winner. Payoffs will be based on the amount of money wagered on the various combinations available to bettors in a variety of pools. Behind the scenes, however, much may have changed. Monday, March 27, is the day that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the national regulatory company created by federal legislation passed late in 2020, plans to implement its Anti-Doping and Medication Control program (ADMC) – provided it receives approval for the program’s rules from a federal agency. If the approval is granted, the implementation of the program will usher in a new era for Thoroughbred racing, in which one institution, rather than each U.S. racing state, will take responsibility for the sport’s drug-testing and enforcement programs, its investigations, and its adjudications of medication and drug violations. Supporters of HISA contend that the day is long past due for a national approach to policing the sport under a single set of rules and procedures. Though the racing industry has nominally worked toward uniform rules in fits and starts for 20 years, the business’s often competing factions – many of which have become accustomed to wielding influence and power within insular state-based regulatory structures – have never come close to uniting at a single table. But don’t let the pending launch of the ADMC fool you. Even if the rules go into effect on Monday in the vast majority of U.S. racing states, the sport will be nowhere close to uniformity, at least philosophically. A long list of horsemen’s organizations – including nearly all the affiliates of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association – and a handful of racing commissions are vigorously fighting HISA’s advance, in courtrooms and board rooms, with the encouragement of political actors who are leveraging the current anti-federal populist movement to their advantage. :: Take your handicapping to the next level and play with FREE DRF Past Performances - Formulator or Classic.  In fact, several courts have sided with HISA’s opponents, including the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which in November of last year released a decision calling the authority’s enabling legislation “facially unconstitutional.” Due to the decision, the Federal Trade Commission late last year declined to approve the ADMC rules. In addition, a Louisiana court ruling last year enjoined HISA from enforcing any of its rules in both Louisiana and West Virginia, two of the states where local politicians and racing constituencies of all stripes have united to oppose HISA’s reach. Other holdouts are Texas and Nebraska, where Sam Houston Race Park and Fonner Park have declined to send their signals out-of-state to evade HISA rules, under heavy influence from the state racing commissions and horsemen’s groups.  So even if the ADMC is launched on March 27, its implementation will be far from welcome. Still, nearly every state where racetracks are operating beginning Monday, including California, Florida, Kentucky, and New York, are expected to be under HISA’s jurisdiction when the ADMC is launched. Like it or not, a new day is dawning. “We really think it’s a momentous occasion and an important day,” said Lisa Lazarus, the chief executive officer, on Thursday. “Change is always hard, and this is a seismic change.”   Similar, but different Most of the aspects of the ADMC will not be visible to horseplayers or bettors, at least not at first. Some trainers and veterinarians may have to modify existing treatment regimens for their horses to comply with some of the new rules, though some states expected to be under the new regulatory scheme, such as California and Kentucky, have medication and treatment rules that are already substantially similar to those that will be enforced by HISA. Indeed, no matter what you may have heard from both supporters and opponents of HISA, the rules on medication and drugs that will be applied to racing licensees under the ADMC are not much different from the ones already used in nearly every racing jurisdiction in the U.S. There’s no sea change there. Some medications will be regulated more strictly, but there are also more nuanced rules to deal with potential environmental contaminants. And nearly every single classified substance contained in state rule books is pretty much in the same classification in the HISA rule book, with only a few exceptions, none of them so significant that they would drive any honest trainer or veterinarian out of business. The biggest difference under the ADMC, for those jurisdictions that will be under its enforcement, is in the chain of command and the adjudication of positives. Both of those elements will be far more streamlined and efficient under the ADMC than under the highly inefficient, duplicative system that racing currently uses, in which every single state operates as its own fiefdom, using staff and resources to do the exact same jobs that are done in the states next door and the states next door to them. Under the ADMC, positive drug tests will be reported to staff at the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit, an enforcement body set up by a HISA contractual partner, Drug Free Sport International, to run the program, from sampling to sanctions. HIWU will then conduct the ensuing investigation into the positive and assign the adjudication of the case to either an Internal Adjudication Panel – for those violations involving regulated medications, such as phenylbutazone and dexamethasone – or an Arbitral Body – for those violations involving banned substances, such as cocaine. HISA officials are adamant that this new adjudication system will resolve violations in a matter of weeks, at a time when racing is accustomed to high-profile cases stretching for years on end through a seemingly endless skein of stewards’ stands, racing commissions, court rooms, and arbitration officers, Bob Baffert's appeal of Medina Spirit's betamethasone positive a prominent example. HISA officials also contend, with a deep reason to believe them, that this system will replace “the previous inconsistent adjudication processes run by state courts, state racing commissions, and stewards,” where violations for identical medications can be met with highly dissimilar penalties. :: Bet the races on DRF Bets! Sign up with code WINNING to get a $250 Deposit Match, $10 Free Bet, and FREE DRF Formulator.  This adjudication system also has several highly visible differences with the current ones run by states. The most obvious, and the one that has the potential to be the most contentious, is the automatic, summary suspension of any trainer with a banned-substance violation. The trainer will remain suspended until the violation is fully adjudicated. That runs counter to the current system in most states, in which trainers with medication violations are routinely allowed to continue to train until a penalty is handed down. “This measure is critical to ensuring integrity in our sport and is a departure from the processes which previously allowed cheaters to evade accountability by exploiting the rule discrepancies in various jurisdictions, continuing to race as they filed appeals and avoided sanctions – including disqualifications – through lengthy litigation,” HISA has said in recent statements explaining the ADMC. The other most visible difference between the current rules enforced in most states and the ADMC rules is that any horse with a medication violation will be disqualified, regardless of the severity of the infraction. Currently in many racing states, violations for regulated medications do not always result in a DQ. In addition, the ADMC rules carve out a distinct adjudication process for a list of medications that are problematic to regulate because they can make their way into a horse’s sample through environmental contamination. Under the program, called “Atypical Findings,” positives for known environmental contaminants will require additional investigation, and if the investigation concludes that a substance was “more likely than not” in a horse’s sample because of contamination, the case will be thrown out “as if it never happened,” Lazarus said. (It’s worth noting here that the decision by the California Horse Racing Board to throw out an environmental contamination case involving the horse Justify in 2018 resulted in widespread criticism of the CHRB – including from individuals who are now highly supportive of HISA.) Lazarus said that opposition from horsemen to the new ADMC system has been based on a “lot of misinformation,” and she said that when she sits down with individual trainers or some groups of horsemen, she is often told that they want a system that catches cheaters, acknowledges the need for therapeutic medication, and has “leeway” for environmental contaminants. “That’s exactly what our program does,” she said. Enforcement uniformity HISA officials have said that the benefit to the new national rules will not solely be in the uniformity of the rule books across state lines. It will also be the uniformity in the enforcement of those rules. In the past, some states have turned a blind eye to certain practices that have been aggressively enforced in other jurisdictions, and some labs have been known to have better proficiency in testing for some substances than other labs. Under the ADMC, all test barns will use the exact same procedures to collect, label, and send off samples, through a new digital processing system. The samples will be sent to a collection of labs that all use the same procedures to test for the same substances, according to HISA and HIWU officials, and those results will all be reported in the same format through the same channels. HIWU officials also say that the sport’s capability to conduct out-of-competition testing will be greatly expanded and enhanced, a strategy that human sports embraced decades ago. HIWU will also be employing so-called “intelligence-based” testing, in which data is used to target some horses for testing based on results that appear to be outliers among the general racing population. Again, human sports have been using the same techniques for years to police their sports. Obviously, the answer to the question as to whether the sport will be better off because of HISA won’t be known until its programs are in place, possibly for years. Lazarus has also acknowledged that it shouldn’t be expected that the programs will operate error-free or that the organization has gotten it exactly right at its launch. “It’s a huge undertaking, it’s a huge program, so I can’t say we won’t have things here or there that need to be fixed,” Lazarus said. But the larger question is whether the ADMC will in fact be launched on Monday. Late last year, the FTC declined to approve a substantially similar tranche of rules for the ADMC, citing the decision in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals calling HISA’s enabling legislation “facially unconstitutional.” That decision still holds. In fact, the Fifth Circuit even declined to re-visit its decision after Congress approved an amendment in late December specifically designed to address the court’s concerns. On the flip side, in early March the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, weighing a case with nearly identical legal issues in the balance, issued a decision contradicting the Fifth Circuit, contending that FTC oversight made HISA “subordinate” to a federal agency, a requirement under interpretations of the Constitution that hold that Congress cannot delegate regulatory authority to a private company. Because of the contradictory Fifth and Sixth Circuit decisions, nearly all involved in racing expect the Supreme Court to seriously consider petitions to weigh in on the conflict in the future. The FTC has until Monday to issue its decision on whether to approve the ADMC rules that were re-submitted to the agency this year, but it’s fair to ask why the FTC would approve the rules when the constitutionality of HISA has yet to be legally resolved – which was its decision last year. Obviously, HISA had no choice but to press ahead to prepare the industry for the launch of the massive program on Monday, because failing to do so could lead to chaos throughout the industry if the FTC approved the rules. So HISA and its officials pushed on relentlessly over the past six months, holding countless educational meetings with racing constituents and conducting endless training sessions with the racing personnel that will need to adapt their protocols and procedures to the new rules. HISA officials say that they are ready for racing’s new day. What remains to be resolved is whether the racing industry is ready for HISA. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.