Official: Horse-drugging cases are bottlenecked in court (SF New Mex)

There’s a public perception that nobody’s doing anything about unscrupulous trainers drugging race horses, state Racing Commission Director Vince Mares told a panel of lawmakers Tuesday. That perception isn’t true, Mares said, but there is a crippling bottleneck of cases in the court system.

Mares spoke to a subcommittee of the Legislative Finance Committee, which is studying possible legislation to fight horse drugging. The state’s horse-racing industry has been under scrutiny since a 2012 New York Times exposé that found five of the six tracks in the nation with the highest drugging incident rates in 2011 were in New Mexico.