Of Poppy Seeds and Chapstick

So Maggi Moss, Steve Asmussen's lawyer and one of his top owners has responded to a column by John Clay in the Lexington Herald-Leader that essentially said a 15 day suspension for a drug violation was not enough to deter trainers from using drugs on their horses.

Her basic defense, as I see it is as follows: "Do you really want someone ruled off that might be innocent or have a case of contamination. Is that the United States we want to live in?"

Residence questions aside, the contamination Ms. Moss refers to pertains to the substance lidocaine which is the drug that was detected in the filly Timber Trick, who broke her maiden at Lone Star Park in Texas on May 10 and then tested positive for the anesthetic. Ms. Moss notes that if "a trainer or his assistant used lip balm, hand cream or any of the over 1000 substances in stores that have metabolites of lidocaine in them and then groomed a horse or gave it water and then passed that metabolite into the horse's system," the horse might test positive for the drug.

So like the elusive poppy seed which we all know triggers a positive reading on drug tests, chapstick apparently sets off the same bells and whistles. Interesting but it remains to be seen how much chapstick would need to pass from human to horse (via water which might dilute it) to trigger a positive. And it also remains to be seen if this has ever happened before.

True it seems unusual that a trainer would use lidocaine on a horse in a maiden race especially a trainer of Asmussen's stature, but stranger things have happened. The point here may be that horse racing is under such a microscope these days that any infraction, especially by high profile trainers, makes headlines, in fact big headlines.

My point is equally simple. Why add fuel to the fire? Ban drugs of all types and let the horses run if they are fit and rest until they get so. Rather than spend all types of money investing in new uniform drug tests across all states, simply save money by eliminating all drugs from racing once and for all.

Not as sexy as chapstick and poppy seeds, but sometimes simple really is best.