In a case that reads like a mashup of Seabiscuit and Breaking Bad, a New Mexico judge stepped in last month to block the state racing commission’s summary suspension of a prominent, Oklahoma-based horse trainer after one of his quarter horses tested positive for trace amounts of methamphetamine following a race in Albuquerque, N.M., last fall.
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The trainer, Michael Wayne Joiner, has maintained that neither he nor his team intentionally or inadvertently administered the drug to the 4-year-old horse, Js on Fire. Instead, Joiner argues that the positive test most likely stemmed from environmental exposure—specifically, contact with meth users allegedly living illegally in the barns at the Downs at Albuquerque, a racetrack situated on the edge of a high-crime area known locally as the “War Zone.”…