UK wins contract for Kentucky drug testing

LEXINGTON, Ky. – The Kentucky Equine Drug Research Council on Friday unanimously approved a recommendation to sign a contract with the University of Kentucky to perform the state’s post-race drug-testing program beginning later this year.

The recommendation, which will need approval from the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, would move the state’s drug-testing responsibilities from Industrial Labs, a Colorado laboratory that has performed drug tests for Kentucky’s racetracks for the past six years. Industrial Labs took over from a private lab previously located outside of Lexington that had to be dropped by the state when its performance began to sputter. It eventually closed.

The University of Kentucky Equine and Analytical Chemistry Lab has been built up under the supervision of Dr. Scott Stanley, a highly respected equine pharmacology expert who was hired by UK in 2018 after 21 years at the University of California-Davis. Stanley was also the previous director of toxicology at Truesdail Laboratories in California.

In testimony, Stanley told the committee that the UK lab has spent $2.5 million on “state-of-the-art” testing equipment and that the lab expects to be “a leader worldwide” in equine drug-testing.

Dr. Bruce Howard, the KHRC’s equine medical director, told the committee that the commission’s staff recommended the change because of the lab’s proximity to state racetracks, which would lead to lower shipping costs, plus the “financial benefit of using tax dollars to support a Kentucky facility.”

Stanley told the committee that the lab has already been accredited by an international agency and that it has received “provisional” accreditation from the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium, an industry-funded group. RMTC accreditation is required for a lab to conduct drug tests in most states.

If the recommendation is approved by the KHRC, the lab would begin testing samples from Kentucky tracks in late June, Dr. Howard said.