Pennsylvania tosses Ness suspension
The Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission has thrown out a six-month suspension it handed to trainer Jamie Ness last year after a positive test in one of his horses for a known environmental contaminant that is also a banned recreational drug.
The decision, first reported by Thoroughbred Daily News, came after Ness appealed the penalty through his attorney Drew Mollica. Ness was suspended six months and fined $5,000 after his horse Crabs N Beer tested positive for bufotenine, a naturally occurring substance that is a Schedule 1 substance in the U.S. because of its hallucinogenic properties, following a win at Parx racetrack outside Philadelphia in February of last year.
“This is a case where common sense and good science prevailed,” Mollica said on Wednesday. “The racing commission conducted its own investigation, and both sides got justice here.”
In its ruling, the racing commission noted that bufotenine is an environmental contaminant and said that the state did not have a threshold level for the detection of the drug. However, the ruling said, the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities regulates bufotenine with a threshold, and “based on the IFHA established threshold, the finding in [Crabs N Beer’s sample] will not be determined as a positive result.”
Bufotenine is a tricky substance to regulate because it occurs naturally in some grasses and also in the skin excretions of some toad species. It is also available in some human recreational drug formulations that are illegal.
The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, which is set to take over enforcement of drug rules in most U.S. jurisdictions later this year, categorizes bufotenine in a “specified substances” list in which investigators are supposed to conduct investigations and perform additional testing in order to determine if it was ingested naturally or administered deliberately.
Ness, who starts horses throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, has trained 3,881 winners from 15,670 starts in his 24-year career, which began to ramp up in the late 2000s. Last year, he posted career highs in wins (324) and earnings ($10.32 million).
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