COMMENTARY : Lasix Study Reflects Poorly on Industry

Racing wears Lasix like a festering, self-inflicted wound on the end of its nose opened by the ax of greed and stamped with the imprimatur of every racing commission in the nation except New York’s.

A University of Pennsylvania research team commissioned by the Jockey Club to study racing’s scourge has shown that Lasix causes horses to run faster. Much faster in some cases. Until now, this could be blithely explained away by reasoning that they run faster because Lasix prevents them from bleeding internally. But Penn researchers working at Philadelphia Park have found that not to be true, either. The damning evidence shows that Lasix enhances performance in the thoroughbred -- and nothing else. The reason is both unclear and extraneous. The concern is effect and the now-documented effect casts a deep shadow over racing’s integrity.

What is criminally clear is that on a typical afternoon at most race tracks outside New York it is not unusual to find more horses racing with Lasix than without. Friday’s card at Pimlico in Baltimore has 56 horses entered with Lasix, 35 without. Of those without, 16 are 3- and 4-year-old maiden claimers entered in the third and 10th races.

The Lasix-treated horse has become the rule rather than the exception, and the most influential individuals in the game are not owners, nor trainers, nor jockeys nor officials -- but the veterinarians, keepers of the juice. It was the standard recommended by the American Association of Equine Practitioners in defining a bleeder that was the basis of the Penn study, a standard so permissive that it demands only the presence of a trace of blood in the trachea for Lasix certification.

Lasix is widely and justifiably believed to mask the presence of other performance-enhancing drugs, a common trait of any powerful diuretic, but only in Illinois is there mandatory pre-race quarantine of Lasix horses. The institutionally sanctioned performance-enhancing drug, then, assists the unscrupulous trainer or veterinarian in the use of other, even more powerful performance-enhancing drugs. This amounts to states aiding and abetting larceny.

Supporters of Lasix are legion, trainers and veterinarians for the most part, in California, Kentucky, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland, all of which employ different standards for certification of a horse as a bleeder and observe varying degrees of public medication disclosure that runs the gamut from none to misleading.

The Daily Racing Form discloses no medication information in its past performance charts. It publishes medication information for some tracks, but not all tracks, obviously feeling no duty to protect its customers from officially sanctioned pitfalls. Many track programs indicate horses running on Lasix for the first time, but the designation means only that they are running on Lasix for the first time in a particular state, leaving the bettors to fend for themselves in cases of shippers. In New York, there is no reliable source of Lasix information on out-of-state shippers.

The universal defense of its use is that Lasix allows horses prone to suffering ruptured pulmonary blood vessels under the stress of racing and training to continue in competition; that its use is an economic imperative. But the fortress constructed around the dark bastion of chemically enhanced performance also absorbed a major blow this week.

If there is a shred of insight into the current state of racing in most places resulting from the survey, it is in the disclosure that Lasix does little, if anything, to prevent exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhage. Clearly, while failing to serve the purpose for which it was intended, it allows the manipulation of performance -- institutionally sanctioned corruption.

The study’s results demand that Lasix be banned everywhere, though that is not likely to happen. The study magnifies the need for standardization of rules and for more stringent regulation. It should make louder the call for less racing. It raises the question: Why was this research not performed before any state allowed the use of Lasix? And it clouds every stakes victory by a horse running on the drug, every championship ever won by a Lasix horse. And most of all, it establishes racing as its own worst enemy.

The best cure for bleeding in a horse is rest. If a horse truly suffers from a bleeding problem, it simply should not be racing. And an owner who cannot afford to rest his horse when necessary should not be in the game.