I had the unique privilege of being the first horseplayer ever invited to be on a panel at the national HBPA meeting held this year in Denver August 7-9.
The medication and drug panel was chaired by Kent Stirling, executive director of the Florida HBPA, who spoke about the potential federal legislation. The HBPA’s general opposition to Federal drug legislation is not an opposition to drug testing, which HBPA fully supports. The issue mainly revolves around trying to use federal legislation to ban the use of Lasix on raceday.
There is a vocal group of horsemen, including the well known manager of Team Valor, Barry Irwin, who are convinced that the use of Lasix gives racing a black eye. As I have mentioned before, drug use or the perception of drug use is often cited as a prime reason why the sport is in continual decline, despite RCI statistics that show less than one half of one percent all post race tests return a positive, and that the vast majority of those positives are for approved therapeutics. Less than 50 positives out of over 324,000 tests are for Class 1 or 2 substances.
The unmistakeable conclusion is that horseracing does not have an out of control drug problem nor is the existing system breaking down. Given the statistics, how can the federal legislation be about anything other than banning raceday Lasix?
Stirling cited a survey that has been conducted in Florida in which 90% of the horsemen (owners and trainers) favor the use of Lasix. The point is that there is a chasm between the anti and pro Lasix crowds, and trying to force a solution through federal legislation is only going to reinforce the divisions. There is a right way to do this, and it involves the industry working toward consensus.
The Lasix issue must be resolved soon. First, it is a boogeyman that keeps racing from addressing the real issues of why fans are abandoning the game. It is not as simple as no Lasix on raceday, and I guarantee that if Lasix was banned tomorrow racing problems would at the least continue, and most likely intensify. There are alternatives to Lasix, some of which are very much worse. It’s not about the Lasix.
The other panel members were Dr. Thomas Tobin, from the Gluck Equine Research Center at the University of Kentucky, Dr. Clara Fenger, head of the North American Association of Racetrack Veterinarians, and Dr. Steven Barker, recently retired from Louisiana State University. All three are highly respected within the industry, and their knowledge and expertise on drug and medication issues is unquestionably superb. It was humbling to be mentioned in the same breath as these industry giants.
I’ll be writing in more detail about the presentations from the other three panelists in a future blog, but I wanted to relate two important points that Dr. Barker made.
- Of the 26 standards for approved medication, 19 are NOT based on scientific study. This is, in my opinion, a horrifying bit of information.
- The emergence of technology that can measure picograms (trillionths of a gram) and femtograms (quadrillionths of a gram) render the adoption of zero tolerance standards ridiculous.
I’ve talked about how a picogram can be viewed for perspective. Imagine a trainer receiving a positive at 49 picograms and relating that to time. 49 seconds is the amount of time that has elapsed since I began writing this paragraph. A trillion seconds is over 31,000 years, a time when man’s ancestors were scribbling on cave walls. If you related it to weight, a trillion pounds would be (about) the combined weight of every person on the face of the earth, and 49 pounds would be the equivalent of finding one four year old boy somewhere in that mass of humanity.
The point Dr. Barker was making was that trainers are receiving punishment for levels that cannot possibly have any impact on performance. Moreover, such miniscule levels are often more representative of environmental contamination rather than drug administration.
The scarier point is, how can racing tolerate standards that are what those in the standard setting business call “WAGs” (wild ass guesses).
My presentation focused on four topics.
- knowledge of and perspective on drug issues on the part of horseplayers;
- setting standards to ban therapeutics;
- absence of thorough investigations;
- punishment out of proportion to violations.
With regard to knowledge and perspective on drug issues, in my experience, most horseplayers have limited familiarity and knowledge of the 26 allowable medications, with the exception of Lasix and some of the NSAIDs (bute and banamine). This often translates into equating violations of therapeutic standards with violations of performance enhancing drugs. This generally leads to the reaction, another trainer trying to gain an advantage got caught.
This lack of understanding also leads to some apathy about the actual details of violations. Horseplayers don’t see the violation in relation to the measurement unit – picograms. It’s a violation regardless of the mount, and often the attitude is, you knew the rules, you broke them, pay the penalty.
I also pointed out that groups like WHOA (water, hay, oats alliance) have made significant inroads, and many players believe Lasix is performance enhancing beyond improvement of EIPH. The problem, of course, is that there have not been specific studies done to quantify any improvement associated with Lasix.
I also suggested that many players cannot always attribute substantial improvement associated with a trainer change with differences in the horsemanship of the respective trainers. It is not uncommon for horseplayers to suspect trainers that improve a horse significantly after a claim of something more magical.
Finally, I pointed out that many players believe there are substances that are undetectable by current technology and that there are trainers not unwilling to use them.
On the other topics I referenced articles I have already published. Setting standards to ban therapeutics was part of the Bill Brashears article. (halveyonhorseracing/?p=1351). Absence of thorough investigations referenced the articles on Kellyn Gorder (halveyonhorseracing/?p=1587) and Chris Grove (halveyonhorseracing/?p=1742). Finally, for punishments out of proportion to the violation, I discussed the case of Mike Norris in Indiana (halveyonhorseracing/?p=1842)
I finished with a series of recommendations:
- Horsemen need to approach state legislatures to provide racing commissions with greater guidance. Right now the commissions have total discretion over the adoption of racing rules, and this has led to many of the problems I cited. They do not often do investigations, and if they do they are often poorly done. In the case of Chris Grove, shouldn’t the most important question to answer have been, where did the nikethamide come from? Shouldn’t the tracks think it important to know who might be a meth user having contact with the horses? Did state legislatures mean to give racing commissions the power to treat felonies like misdemeanors and vice versa?
- Given the poor timing of lab results from some of the testing facilities, shouldn’t some violations that occur for the same substance but before the trainer is notified of the first positive be automatically combined into one violation? This might not apply to Class 1 or 2 substances, but certainly for Class 4 or 5 substances.
- There should be de minimis levels for substances where environmental contamination is the most likely explanation for a positive. ARCI is already looking at this issue. You simply cannot have zero tolerance standards when such contaminations are not that uncommon.
- There should be an absolute right to be represented by counsel and the HBPA rep in any meeting with regulators. I have heard a number of stories where trainers were required to attend a meeting regarding a violation but were not allowed to bring counsel.
- Records should be expunged after five years for minor and administrative violations. When New York decided to suspend Dick Dutrow for 10 years, the press release made him sound like a serial abuser, except almost all of the 80 violations that were cited were for things like “failure to have foal papers on file,” “late to the paddock,” and “failure to have the proper colors.” These are really the equivalent of parking tickets and overstate the serial nature of a trainer’s transgressions.
- There should be standards that include both threshold levels AND withdrawal times for certain Class 3. 4. and 5 approved therapeutic substances.
I will continue my work to make racing fairer AND cleaner through this blog. For now, I want to thank the HBPA for the opportunity to provide my insight into medication standards.
