Racing Dealing With Misguided Drug Policy

Illegal use of clenbuterol has been thoroughbred racing’s sorriest scandal in recent years. Little-known trainers became miracle workers by administering the medication; their cheating was so flagrant that they undermined bettors’ confidence in the integrity of the game. Some were eventually caught when their horses tested positive for the drug, giving the sport a black eye it didn’t need.

Naive outsiders might expect that the racing industry would try to rid itself of clenbuterol. But the industry traditionally moves in the opposite direction--it stops cheating by legalizing a banned substance. It did this with both Butazolidin and Lasix. And this week the Kentucky Racing Commission liberalized its rules governing the use of clenbuterol--a move that might be the first step toward wider national use of the once-forbidden drug.

Advocates tout clenbuterol as a therapeutic medication that won’t affect horses’ racing performance if it is properly controlled. Others see the Kentucky decision as just the latest demonstration of the racing industry’s chronic inability to say no to drugs.

Clenbuterol helps many horses with respiratory problems, but thoroughbreds are not allowed to race with the aid of the drug. Any trace of the substance in post-race urine tests constitutes a violation that can result in a trainer’s suspension. Trainers caught with a clenbuterol positive often protested that they administered the drug long before the race and thought that it would be out of the horse’s system. Now Kentucky will permit a trace of clenbuterol to show up in the urine, and horses won’t flunk the test unless the amount exceeds a certain threshold. Horsemen are being told that they can safely administer Ventipulmin Syrup--the oral form of clenbuterol--up to 72 hours before a race.

Bernie Hettel, executive director of the commission, said the board was guided by the recommendations of Thomas Tobin, a doctor and an expert at the University of Kentucky. Tobin advised: “Super-sensitive testing can detect traces of (clenbuterol) for one or more months after the last dose. ... Such sensitive testing deprives horses in training of the therapeutic benefits of this agent. Less sensitive testing, consistent with a three-to-five day withdrawal period, prevents horses from running ‘on’ Ventipulmin Syrup, but allows its appropriate therapeutic use.”

It is easy to react cynically whenever a veterinarian, trainer or spokesman for a horsemen’s organization utters the word “therapeutic”--particularly after the campaigns to get Bute and Lasix legalized in the 1970s.

The first trainers to use Lasix illegally were able to bring about stunning form reversals; sometimes they would claim a horse and improve him overnight, by as much as 10 or 20 lengths, by administering the diuretic. Eventually most trainers were clamoring to use the wondrous drug. So horsemen and veterinarians went before state racing commissions and assured them that Lasix was a therapeutic medication that didn’t affect horses’ form. Of course, everybody who had witnessed those 10- and 20-length form reversals knew this was poppycock, but even today horsemen and vets maintain this fiction.