Long time trainer Roy Sedlacek has pled guilty to using a product containing the drug AH-7921.

For those of you not familiar with the drug – that would pretty much be all of us – according to Wikipedia, “AH-7921 is an opioid analgesic drug selective for the µ-opioid receptor, having around 80% the potency of morphine when administered orally.”

According to Matt Hegarty’s article in the Daily Racing Form, the drug would not only act as a painkiller, but also as a mild stimulant in horses. That sounds like the greatest illegal drug you could have come up with to give to racehorses. The horse feels no pain while simultaneously wanting to run all day.

AH-7921 was thought to have been developed in the 1970s by Allen and Hanburys as a strong pain reliever. It was never developed commercially, but experts have suggested the substance may have been re-created using information from archaic science reports.

According to toxicologist John Ramsey, “We don’t know anything about the health consequences of using these sort of things because no research has been done on it. It is generally accepted [AH-7921] could be hazardous and you have to go out of your way to find it.”

Speculation is that the drug is being synthesized in China and India and is being used as an ingredient in synthetic marijuana. Apparently, some of these supplement companies have also found it.

According to the DRF article, “Sedlacek testified [at his hearing] that he administered an oral substance to the two horses approximately three hours prior to post. Furthermore, Sedlacek said that he was under the belief that the substance, which he obtained from a website, contained “ITPP,” the acronym for a powerful performance-enhancing substance that is extraordinarily difficult to obtain but that is often inaccurately listed as an ingredient in products with highly dubious claims most often obtained from Internet companies.”

DRF looked on the “notorious” internet supplement seller site, horseprerace.com, in search of ITPP with no success. However, if you go to horseprerace.com, you’ll find that not only are they interested in helping the horseracing community, but greyhounds, camels, alpacas and racing pigeons. Perhaps the Barr-Tonko bill could be amended to include the rest of the menagerie of racing animals as part of any potential drug testing program. It certainly proves the point, if someone is betting on it, someone else is looking for a chemical edge. I mean, supplements for pigeons? Seriously?

I loved the product names at horseprerace.com. Here are some.

• Blast Off Pressure (a diuretic to help EIPH), primarily ammonium chloride
• Numb It, once known as the Purple Pain Injection. This stuff is so good, the formula is proprietary, so buy it at your own risk.
• Game Time Injection to help your horse focus.
• Lightning Injection (how can that be bad?)
• Super Shot Injection, which apparently works as well on camels as horses.
• Green Speed, something that produces a sense of euphoria and alertness.
• And my favorite, Superfecta.

I don’t know about you, but it would be pretty tempting just to see if Lightning Injection could turn your average $12K claimer into the equine equivalent of the Flash.

None of the listed ingredients for the products I clicked on looked like synthetic morphine, but anyone who is familiar with the regulation of supplements knows that they are not required to have an FDA certification. All a firm is responsible for ensuring is that the products it manufactures or distributes are safe, any claims made about the products are not false or misleading and the products comply with the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and FDA regulations in all other respects. However, the supplements may or may not contain the exact amounts of the specified ingredients and they may have contaminants. While there are reputable supplement manufacturers, there has always been variability in that market.

In Sedlacek’s case, it appears his intent was to try to gain an edge with supplements, so whether the product he bought listed AH-7921 or not is irrelevant. Whether he knew exactly what he was buying is equally irrelevant. He was likely offered a plea deal that limited his suspension to five years in return for a guilty plea – that happens all the time in most jurisdictions. There’ll be a lot of people screaming for a lifetime ban, lest everyone get the message that you can cheat and get off relatively easy, but there isn’t a criminal justice jusrisdiction that doesn’t plea bargain most of their cases, rightly or wrongly. Let’s hope the Commission knew what they were doing.

Given Sedlacek had started so few horses this year, the potential damage was limited. Still, there were a number of things I found bothersome. First, while I haven’t looked at the Commission hearing record, there has been nothing in the media to confirm Sedlacek identified the “oral substance” by name (other than to say whatever it was contained ITPP) so other horsemen would know not to use that product. Second, the Commission apparently didn’t provide the results of the test that found AH-7921. The head of the lab that found the drug was certain it was injected on raceday, but what’s the big secret? I have always believed racing fans have a right to know whether a trainer is being accused based on a level that is more likely cross-contamination, at such a level that the drug would have no efficacy, or definitely at a performance enhancing level, regardless of whether the trainer pled guilty or not guilty.

The groups that I would really like to take to task are ARCI (Association of Racing Commissioners International) and RMTC (Racing Medication and Testing Consortium). They know about the internet sites that are selling unregulated supplements, and RMTC has done some testing of supplements. Instead of racing commissions spending the largest part of their enforcement budget trying to catch “cheaters” after the fact, as part of continuously cleaning up the sport commissions should fund RMTC so that they can continue to regularly order Lightning Injection and as many of the more commonly used supplements as possible and continuously test them. The commissions should be funding studies on horses in training to determine if the claims of the supplement manufacturers hold any water. They would publish all the results of their testing and studies and send out bulletins to the horsemen with the results. If they found certain substances would cause positive tests, they would inform the horsemen immediately and put those substances on a banned list. Everyone involved needs to be proactive, not mainly reactive.

Why don’t the commissions take the initiative? RMTC would tell you it would not be cheap to do so because there are so many supplements out there, the supplement formulas constantly change, and testing in the past has not been fruitful in their opinion because of the low percentage of illegal substances found. However, if RMTC is finding illegal substances in any of the supplements they are testing (and they are), that should make the program valuable and necessary. I’ve also said in the past, if you can afford to do over 300,000 blood and urine tests a year, you can figure out a way to divert some of that testing money to research that would benefit the sport, and especially the horsemen. And you can’t tell me the horsemen wouldn’t be happy to to see research that could wind up preventing them getting the same five years Sedlacek got.

In my opinion, the problem is that ARCI does not see itself in partnership with the horsemen, but views the horsemen as the enemy. Instead of working together to prevent violations, ARCI seems far more focused on the enforcement part of the equation. They are beside themselves when they find a picogram violation of a therapeutic medication, but wouldn’t it be far more satisfying for them to say they helped to get a useless or dangerous substance out of the barns of trainers? Wouldn’t it have been better if Roy Sedlacek never had a positive test? Wouldn’t it instill confidence in horseplayers if they read that regulators, testing groups and horsemen worked together to get rid of some harmful supplement?

Don’t just put out an alert for jurisdictions to test for AH-7921. Get the supplement Roy Sedlacek used, test it, and if it contains Class 1 substances, make sure to tell trainers not to administer it. Is this really that hard?