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A judge in Florida this week ruled that testing protocols used by Florida gambling regulators to nab racing greyhounds competing on the state’s race tracks while coked out of their little dog minds were outlawed, potentially clearing the way for rampant use of the illicit substance among dishonorable dogs, according to a News 4 Jacksonville report:

[Judge Lawrence P. Stevenson] sided with the trainers in the 13-page order that centered on a 2010 procedures manual. In the earlier case, Administrative Law Judge F. Scott Boyd in 2015 decided a key section of the manual, which deals with drug testing, amounted to a rule that had not been properly adopted. Boyd ordered gambling regulators to discontinue relying on the manual.

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But the state agency conceded that “the protocols and procedures by which racing greyhounds urine is sampled” hasn’t changed since Boyd’s 2015 decision in what is known as the Dawson case, Stevenson wrote. “The methods used are substantially similar, if not identical, to those set forth in the 2010 Manual,” he wrote.


According to the report, there is concern among animal rights activists that, having had its testing procedures definitively slapped down, regulators will be “effectively banned” from testing racing greyhounds for drugs. The two trainers whose coke dogs were nabbed via the outlawed protocols will go unpunished, and other coke dog cases may consequently be dismissed, allowing God knows how many coke dogs to go free.