On Tuesday, the Association of Racing Commissioners International issued an update to its Uniform Classification Guidelines for Foreign Substances and Recommended Penalties and Model Rule document.

The most current version of this document is Version 8.00, which has a release date of December 2014. Version 8.0 makes the following changes:

• Updated the Recommended Penalties Section for Ketoprofen to comply with the ARCI Controlled Therapeutic Medication Schedule.

• Assigned penalty recommendation for Alclofenac.

• Updated the penalty recommendation for Firocoxib to comply with the ARCI Controlled Therapeutic Medication Schedule.

• Added Aminorex to document to avoid confusion. Note this does not change ARCI policy since all Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Schedule 1 substances are automatically a Class 1, Penalty A substance in the Uniform Classification Guidelines.

• Technical corrections and spelling errors were corrected for 10 other substances or areas of the document.

A complete list of the changes can be found in the Recent Document Revisions section of the document, which begins on Page 31. The new version of the document is linked and available here.

RCI also announced that it has voted to create a permanent scientific advisory board to develop recommendations upon which anti-doping programs are conducted, modeled in part after the process conducted in human sport by the Partnership for Clean Competition.

“The RCI Board believes the advisory process on racing medication and anti-doping policy can be strengthened and redundancies eliminated,” RCI Chairman John T. Ward, Jr. said. “As regulators, we have the exclusive responsibility to make and enforce the rules and given current challenges we believe it is time to restructure the advisory process to make it stronger.”

The action was prompted by numerous factors: functional concerns about the current scientific advisory process, transparency, non-participation of key experts, and the withdrawal of the United States Trotting Association from the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC).

Regulators from twenty-one major racing jurisdictions directed RCI President Ed Martin to send a formal letter to the RMTC, proposing a partial or complete merger of the organization into a reconstituted RCI Drug Testing Standards and Practices Committee.

“Given the economic challenges faced by the racing industry, we believe any effort to eliminate redundancies and simplify processes is the right way to go,” Martin said.

Should the RMTC accept an invitation to merge, it would not be the first time that RCI has worked to effectuate a racing industry merger. In 2005, the North American Pari-Mutuel Regulators Association merged with RCI. “Today, our collective effort is stronger, more professional, and effective than when we had two groups,” Martin wrote.

“The current policy formation process has seven steps. We think that can be cut to five,” Martin said. (See chart in attached Press Release)

Membership on the Scientific Advisory Board is by appointment of the RCI Chairperson. Information as to its membership will be posted on the RCI website when fully constituted.

(ARCI)