Drugs in Horseracing: Who’s Causing the Problem?

Scott Lake, once THE mega-claiming trainer in the Mid-Atlantic, was initially suspended for 60 days by the Maryland Racing Commission for having a horse test positive for the steroid stanozolol, sold as  Winstrol.  Maryland recently adopted the Racing Commissioners International (RCI) rules developed under the National Uniform Medication Program (NUMP). You know how each state has rules for how many points a driver can accumulate before losing his license? NUMP is the same concept except not only does each violation accumulate points, it also comes with a suspension. The more points you accumulate, the longer each subsequent suspension is.

Lake had a stanozolol positive at Penn National in June, which earned him four points on the NUMP scale. The second positive at Laurel in December earned him another four points, jumping the initial 60 day Maryland suspension to  120 days.

Lake appealed, although his main argument seems to be with the fairness of the cumulative aspect of the penalty. Lake suggests that the same violation should get the same penalty for all trainers, apparently irrespective of previous violations.

It’s an interesting topic for argument, but I have two issues I’d rather discuss. First is the inconsistency regarding regulatory levels in the various jurisdictions. I’ll give you a real life example.

A trainer (nameless for the moment but one that I will eventually doing a big story about) was found in violation in Pennsylvania for the drug fluphenazine, a class 2 medication. The drug is used to calm down horses  with behavioral issues. The particular horse in question had flipped on multiple occasions during training and the stable veterinarian recommended fluphenazine. Fluphenazine, sold as Prolixin, is an anti-psychotic drug used to treat schizophrenic type behavior, and while you can argue about whether it is the best choice given other treatment options, it is a relatively cheap and effective treatment for the type of behavioral problems this horse had.

The horse in this case responded well to the treatment. The trainer then decided to look for a race for the horse, but first checked with his vet to make sure he wouldn’t violate any medication rules. The vet, Maryland based, assured the trainer that Maryland rules required only a seven-day waiting period after the treatment. The trainer entered the horse in Maryland 21 days after the treatment, and the race didn’t fill. He then found a race in West Virginia and again the race didn’t fill. Finally he found a race in Pennsylvania, 35 days after the horse was treated. Unfortunately, the vet wasn’t fullly familiar with Pennsylvania rules regarding fluphenazine, and the trainer didn’t do any research, so he assumed 35 days would be plenty of time between treatment and race. The horse won, was tested and came back positive for fluphenazine.

The problem was that in Pennsylvania there was a zero-tolerance rule for fluphenazine. In the hearing the trainer was told there was a 180 day waiting period for the drug. In almost all horses, fluphenazine will completely metabolize in 45-90 days, so while the people in Pennsylvania provided advice that was a bit too conservative, it is likely under a zero-tolerance policy any horse would almost certainly test positive after only 35 days. Was it the trainer’s fault he didn’t know the rule? Technically, yes. But the fluphenazine had long since stopped having any real physiological effect on the horse, and having adjacent states with such disparate standards has to drive trainers in the Mid-Atlantic crazy. The fluphenazine made the horse capable o racing where it wasn’t previously, but it didn’t make horse run faster.

Once again, I’m going to go into a lot more detail about this in a comprehensive future report, including some surprising opinions from leading equine pharmacologists, but at this point the trainer is stuck with a Class 2 violation even though the horse almost certainly won on its own ability. Pennsylvania’s rule in this case was the equivalent of getting a speeding citation for going a quarter MPH over the speed limit.

The second issue is that there is a substantial difference between a positive for theraputic drugs and drugs that have no other purpose than to either enhance or depress performance. The drug Lake was cited for, stanozolol, is an accepted theraputic medication, although as a steroid it can have performance enhancing effects. In humans it is known as a “cutting” drug, meaning it builds lean muscle mass while reducing fat. In horses it is often used to stimulate appetite. The injectable version has a half-life of about 24 hours, meaning it would be a while before a horse’s system was completely clear of the drug. In fact, it would show up well after the drug had stopped having any measurable physiological effect.

ALL DRUGS ARE PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING and given modern measurment technology that can detect picograms (trillionths of a gram) it may take months before some drugs become unmeasurable. If you took ibuporfen for a headache yesterday, it would be detectable tomorrow even though four hours after you took it the headache returned.

Many owners, especially at the smaller tracks, simply can’t afford to take essentially clean horses out of training for an extra three months while the picograms reduce to zero.

I don’t want to blame the storytelling press – after all, they just report the news, not make it – but they are not fully doing their job when they don’t report the level at which the violation was measured and the likelihood that level was performance enhancing or depressing. It is important that the racegoing public understand when a positive is technical and when it is substantive. Trainers are pilloried for positives, but how often do you see a story taking a racing commission to task for punishing a trainer for a positive at a no more than a trace level? I know I’ve written about Doug O’Neill and the oxazepam violation that would have been laughable had it not been so costly.

Too many trainers are winding up with violations that are for trace levels of theraputics and that do not impact performance in the way a high level of a Class 1 opiate would. Subsequent violations result in excessive penalties. Too many trainers wind up with “points” for violations that no trained equine pharmacologist would call performance-affecting.

I don’t know enough of the details surrounding Scott Lake’s violations for stanozolol to know if he is a “cheat,” he got caught up in not paying close enough attention to medication standards in the different states, or if he just pushed the medication evelope a little too hard. Fining and suspending trainers who are trying to keep their horses on the track with legal, theraputic medication, and who are racing them well after the theraputic effects have dissipated is not in the best interest of racing. It creates the appearance of rampant drug abuse.

Racing commissions rightfully work to keep the game clean, but there is no shame in reserving the harshest punishments for only the truly guilty. In a subsequent post I’ll go into detail about how racing commissions can do a fairer job of only punishing those who deserve harsh punishments. In the meantime, let’s expect more than a regurgitation of the racing commission press releases from the mainstream press. Let’s provide enough detail to know whether we’ve been protected or a clean trainer has been caught up in the system.