With the news media demanding answers, Dr. Rick Arthur, the California board’s equine medical director, went to a racing industry publication, The Blood-Horse, to explain why his science had led him and the board to look past the failed test.

He said the presence of an additional chemical in Justify’s biological sample suggested that the scopolamine had to have come from the ingestion of jimson weed rather than a pharmaceutical, and he said many experts have decided scopolamine doesn’t really help anyway. In other words, just trust them.

There is this, though: The quantity of the drug found in Justify suggested that it was not the result of feed or bedding contamination and that it was intended to enhance performance, according to Dr. Rick Sams, who ran the drug lab for the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission from 2011 to 2018. Dr. Sams said scopolamine can have performance-enhancing benefits. Dr. Arthur did not explain why there might have been so much more scopolamine in Justify than in the other horses.

No matter which authority one trusts, there is an interesting detail about how this situation was handled. Human athletes who fail drug tests are responsible for whatever substances are found in their systems, regardless of how they got there, because whether or not the athletes intended to, they were competing with an advantage. They also are responsible for attempting to clear their names once they test positive.

In Justify’s case, he was found to have an illegal substance in his system, and then the people who administered the test took it upon themselves to spend four months trying to clear Justify of wrongdoing.

The handling of the case prompts a question for some: What else have California officials made disappear and for whom?