HORSE RACING : Commission Takes Tunnel View of Lasix

A year ago, racing commissions in the mid-Atlantic region began working together to fashion uniform rules governing the use of medication. Their first task was to decide how horses would be treated with Lasix: the dosage and the number of hours before a race that it would be administered.

This might sound like an innocuous project, but the effort to find a consensus collapsed last week. It failed because one state resisted more stringent standards controlling the uses of Lasix. The state was Maryland. Its racing commission accepted horsemen’s arguments that the rules needed to be more liberal to help thoroughbreds with serious bleeding problems.

Experts in the field doubt that Maryland’s more permissive rules would do this. But they say these rules will allow Lasix to be used as a mask for prohibited drugs much more easily in Maryland than in neighboring states.

The effort to forge a regional consensus on Lasix made great sense -- for horsemen, who had to deal with different rules whenever they cross a state line -- and for horseplayers too.

“Horses are shipped so much in this area,” said Ken Kirchner, executive secretary of the Pennsylvania Racing Commission, “that you’d like to know that a horse who ships in is running on the same (dosage) limits as in other states.” Another motive for the commissions’ efforts was the public concern that Lasix, a brand of the diuretic furosemide, is being abused -- a concern heightened by a University of Pennsylvania study that was published last year. “One of the big issues that’s hung over Lasix is its masking effect,” Kirchner said.

There is no question that this is an issue. In “Drugs and the Performance Horse,” Thomas Tobin champions Lasix as a benign and effective medication, but says it can reduce the concentration of certain forbidden drugs in a horse’s urine to one-fiftieth of their levels if Lasix weren’t there. He acknowledges that the dilution of potent drugs could frustrate chemists’ efforts to detect them, and says this dilution is “the only potential problem” he sees from Lasix.

To ensure that Lasix couldn’t mask prohibited drugs, the commissioners considered three standards that had been proposed as a national guideline by the American Association of Equine Practitioners: The maximum dose would be 5cc. The medication would be given four hours before race time. The injection would be give intravenously, not intramuscularly.

All of these standards were designed to let Lasix treat bleeding without allowing it to be administered with a potency that would mask other drugs.

Three state racing commissions -- Pennsylvania’s, New Jersey’s and Delaware’s -- agreed to these guidelines. Maryland’s racing commission held a series of hearings on the issue, but the proposed tightened standards drew criticism from trainers and private veterinarians. Ken Schertle, executive secretary of the Maryland commission, said “horsemen and practicing vets felt there was a need for a higher range of dosage” to treat more serious bleeders.

So Maryland set these standards. The maximum Lasix dose would be 10cc, and 15cc would be permitted with the approval of a state vet. The medication would be given three hours before race time. The injection could be given either intravenously or intramuscularly.

And while it was permitting horsemen and vets to do just about anything they wanted, the commission also eliminated the longstanding Maryland ban on Lasix treatment for 2 year olds.

The supposed rationale for the horsemen’s argument is that if some Lasix helps a bleeder, then more Lasix will help him more. But Lawrence Soma, who authored the University of Pennsylvania study on the drug, disputes this notion: “Vets from Maryland tell you that a higher dose will make a horse run better, but there’s no data whatsoever that this is true, or that if a horse bleeds through one dose he won’t bleed through another. They’re going against all the literature available and against most of the country. But the higher doses do have a diluting effect.”

Another nationally known expert on medication -- who asked not to be identified -- said the same: “The only thing you can say for sure about increased dosage is that it will prolong the pharmacological effects of Lasix and dilute the presence of other drugs. I tend to doubt whether it will benefit the horse.”

Why did the Maryland Racing Commission approve rules that leave the potential for so much abuse? To people who have observed the whole Lasix debate -- which started nearly 20 years and many commissions ago -- this is no surprise. When the laymen on the commission try to deal with a highly technical subject, they turn for guidance to experts, and these experts are inevitably horsemen and veterinarians.

When these people testify, they are thinking about their own interests -- e.g., the serious bleeder in their barn -- and not about the interests of the public or the sport as a whole. Cynics might point out too that when prohibited drugs are used on thoroughbreds, the cheaters are unscrupulous trainers and private vets.

Their testimony to the commission may be equivalent to a fox’s assurances that the chicken coop’s security is perfectly adequate. It ought to be the job of a racing commission to look above these narrow interests and think about what is good for the game as a whole. And as other states in the region properly concluded, the best interests of racing are not served by wide-open, virtually uncontrolled use of Lasix.