Prairie Meadows trainer disputes horse's positive drug test

Altoona, IA - June 13, 2011 - Gene Jacquot, a trainer at Prairie Meadows, is contesting a positive drug test for one of his horses, saying the level was so minute that it must have been from accidental contamination.

Prairie Meadows stewards have suspended trainer Gene Jacquot pending a hearing. Jacquot’s See Me Now tested positive for the amphetamine cathinone following a third-place finish May 21.

Jacquot said See Me Now was never given cathinone and that the amount in his system was 3 nanograms — 3 billionths of a gram. He thinks the horse picked up the trace level from someone or something in the environment.

“I just feel like I’ve been thrown under the bus for nothing,” Jacquot said. “They don’t have the thresholds on little, itty bit amounts like that. It’s a contaminant and they’re calling me a criminal. I didn’t even know what it was.”

Jacquot said his help was tested and none tested positive. He said he invited Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation agents to search his barn for anything illegal.

“They went through my barn, and I told them to look for anything they wanted,” Jacquot said.

Cathinone, which grows on trees in Africa, is a Class 1 drug violation in horse racing, putting it in the highest category of banned substances. It is illegal in the United States and banned in horses.

The national recommended penalty is a minimum one-year suspension.

One of the hot issues in horse racing is whether threshold limits for drug testing should be established to separate environmental contamination from those who inject their horses with drugs. Today’s tests are so sophisticated, the argument goes, that if someone handles a dollar bill, the residue of the ink can show up in his system.

Among humans, the Department of Defense sets a threshold level of 500 nanograms for amphetamines and 150 nanograms for cocaine.

In 1997, the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission fined trainer Dick Clark $750, but issued no suspension, after his Shardona tested positive for cocaine, saying the minute amount appeared to be accidental contamination. Shardona showed 1.5 nanograms of cocaine and 6 nanograms of benzoylecaine, a derivative of cocaine.

Some states have a zero-tolerance policy, meaning that any amount is a positive. Other states have set minimum levels before a test is considered a positive. Those include Oklahoma, California, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Oregon and Indiana.

That has resulted in wildly different penalties by state.

Read More: Des Moines Register