Lab alleged to have missed Indiana drug positives

Indiana’s primary testing laboratory failed to detect seven regulated or prohibited drugs during an analysis of 26 days of test results from this spring, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Indiana Horse Racing Commission.

Truesdail Laboratory, which was awarded a contract to be Indiana’s primary testing laboratory earlier this year, failed to detect the positive results from samples collected after live-racing performances from late March to early May, the commission said in the report. The seven results included six Class 4 regulated drugs and one Class 1 prohibited drug, Ritalin, according to the report.

The commission terminated its contract with Truesdail in May after earlier quality-control tests had determined that the lab failed to detect illegal concentrations of drugs in three post-race samples. The commission then conducted a full audit on the samples sent to Truesdail after live racing began in the state in late March through the termination of the contract.

The quality-control tests were conducted by sending splits of the post-race samples to one audit laboratory, Industrial Laboratories in Colorado, and two referee labs, the LGC Science lab in Kentucky and the University of California at Davis lab, according to the IHRC. In some cases, the test results by the audit lab and referee labs indicated the presence of the regulated medications at four times the allowable level, according to data distributed by the commission. In those cases, Truesdail did not report any impermissible levels of the medications, the report said.

In four of the test results, Truesdail was given the opportunity to re-test the samples, and the lab failed to find the medications a second time, the report said. The positive findings included four corticosteroids, a mild anti-inflammatory, a muscle relaxer, and Ritalin, which could have stimulant effects on a horse if administered in a large dose.

“It is disconcerting to see that the missed findings of the primary laboratory were not limited to a certain drug or category of drug but instead was an across-the-board failure to find any violations present in any Indiana sample,” the report said.

Truesdail, located in Tustin, Calif., has had a leading reputation among testing laboratories over the past decade, and it conducts post-race drug testing for a number of jurisdictions. It was one of the first laboratories to be accredited under standards developed by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium several years ago.

Dionne Benson, the executive director of the RMTC, said that the consortium will conduct its own analysis of Truesdail’s operations over the next several months to determine whether its accreditation should be reconsidered. The process will include a site visit to the laboratory and an analysis of the contract between Truesdail and the Indiana commission, Benson said.