Medication Regulation Was Hot Topic at NHBPA Convention

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A horse comes up with a post-race finding of Dextrorphan, a psychoactive drug. Or Tramadol, a quasi-opiate and arthritis pain reliever. The human anti-depressant Venlafaxine.

These sure sound like instances of trainers trying to take an edge in a race, right? Why else would those drugs be in a horse?

But consider the case where a groom was taking Nyquil for a cold. It was one of his horses that had a finding of Dextrorphan, an ingredient in many cold medications, including Nyquil, Mucinex, Robitussin, Vicks and Theraflu.

Tramadol, a human prescription medication, appears to have no effect on horses but can readily transfer from man to animal, including through human urine.

The Venlafaxine? It was traced to sodium bicarbonate.

These were examples given by the University of Kentucky's renowned equine pharmacologist Tom Tobin; Kentucky veterinarian and PhD Clara Fenger, equine attorneys Brad Beilly of Florida and Kentucky's Mike Meuser in Friday's medication forum of the National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Association winter convention.

The message by the panel, including Kent Stirling, executive director of the Florida HBPA: Owners and trainers want the sport's cheaters to be detected and punished. At the same time, testing has become so sensitive that the regulations have not kept pace, with some mind-boggling findings–and explanations–occurring because of environmental contamination of both therapeutic medications and drugs that have no legitimate purpose in a horse.

“We all know we need to regulate medication,” Meuser said. “What I see is whole system could find it's way into court and be declared unconstitutional because landscape has changed…. The law has to be rational and has to be fair.”

Tobin said his first interaction with what he called “inconsequential trace level identifications of environmental substances” came years ago when a Danish horse tested positive in Sweden for Isoxsuprine, which is used to improve blood flow to horse's feet, in spite of not having been treated with that medication for a year. Tobin said it turned out to be stall contamination, even a year later.

“You can find it in cobwebs in the stall,” Tobin said. “… Can this happen in other substances? I'd say absolutely.”

Fenger, founder of the new North American Association of Racetrack Veterinarians, said the human justice system has done a better job with cut-off and screening levels.

“We've come to that in horse racing for some things, such as morphine,” she said. “But we're not there yet. Our drug-testing methods are down to picograms per milliliter, which is one in a trillion.”

Fenger said the hallmarks of environmental contamination are that the substance remains stable in the environment, it is readily absorbed orally and eliminated in high concentrations in the urine.

She talked about a study that involved stripping the normal bedding out of the stall every day after a horse was treated with the anti-inflammatory Banamine. Even so, random high spikes of the medication were detected. When the stalls were bedded very deep with straw and stripped, there were rare positive findings for very low amounts.

“The highest risk was low bedding,” she said. In reference the cost of straw, she asked rhetorically of bedding a stall that deep and then throwing it all away every day, “How much would it add to the cost of your day rate if you did that?”

Fenger also cited a study by Steve Barker, Louisiana State's recently retired equine lab director, where he tested stalls in the receiving barn and post-race test barn, including dust samples. Fenger said 16 of 17 samples tested positive for Banamine, 14 for Naproxen, 10 for caffeine and “100% for a metabolite of nicotine.”

Meuser said a substance can actually be in more than one form, with important distinctions. He said the classic case is the picogram methamphetamine finding in a horse trained by Kellyn Gorder in 2014. The Churchill Downs stewards handed Gorder a year's suspension and $5,000. Gorder hired Meuser and is appealing to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission's hearing officer.

Meuser said he hired human-testing expert Theodore Shults, who received a master's degree under Tobin and went on to run testing at the Department of Justice and the military.

“He said, 'You need to have this tested for the isomers of methamphetamine, because there are two,'” Meuser said. “'The 'D' is the bad stuff that the drug-makers come up with. But the 'L' isomer is mixed in any over-the-counter inhaler you can buy at the drug store.'”

The attorney said the referee sample in the case tested for a trace of the L isomer in both urine and blood.

“Technology has outrun the regulations,” he said. “We need to look at human medicine on how to fix that. The level of methamphetamine that Kellyn Gorder had in his horse was 500 times lower than for humans.”

 

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