We’re really fortunate that practitioners who truly understand and care about equine welfare long ago developed our federation’s rules regarding the medications with which we can treat our competing horses. We’re also fortunate that our federation’s leaders have allocated millions of dollars a year to study and enforce those rules, a commitment that, it’s now clear, has made us the world’s most knowledgeable country about equine drugs and medications.
There is a caveat to that, though, noted Dr. Kent Allen, chairman of the USEF Drugs and Medications Committee, in a conversation I had with him at the USEF convention (p. 8). “We have the most liberal drug rule in the world, but with that comes a responsibility to curb abuse,” he said. And to make sure that no one is abusing their privilege, USEF officials will increase drug testing from 9,500 samples in 2004 to 11,500 in 2005, even though they already do the most testing of any equine organization in the world.
The trick with any drug rule is that the testing and the penalties have to discourage people from using more exotic drugs to make lame horses sound or hot horses quiet. That’s why they’re always improving their techniques at the USEF laboratory in Ithaca, N.Y. And it means that the penalties for people who misuse the drug rule have to be stiff enough to deter others from calculating that the price of getting caught is less than the reward of winning a class or selling an unsound or inappropriate horse to an unsuspecting buyer.
Now Allen and USEF President David O’Connor are ready to embark on a two-pronged project to further protect that responsibility. The first step is to classify all drugs and medications into three or four categories, ranging from therapeutic medications with no performance effect to drugs with no therapeutic use but major performance effect. The most notable of the latter is Fluphenazine, reportedly found in Olympic show jumping gold medalist Waterford Crystal. Fluphenazine is a human psychotropic drug that Allen said “has no therapeutic use in the horse” and has tremendously detrimental side effects. Reserpine, he said, also doesn’t belong in a competing horse, although it is extremely effective on horses requiring long rehabilitation.
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The second step is that for these and similar drugs that affect the central nervous system, O’Connor wants mandatory penalties that will “knock it out of the ballpark. We want to treat them with the seriousness of anabolic steroids in humans.” He’s talking five-figure fines and suspensions of years, perhaps even lifetime for repeat offenders, far more than the $3,000 to $5,000 fines and three- to six-month suspensions currently meted out for these. He said he doesn’t envision drastically increasing the penalties for the other classes, perhaps not at all.
That brings us to the Federation Equestre Internationale, where the basic philosophy has long been that any trace of any medication is performance enhancing. I suspect that philosophy has been largely emotionally influenced, but the fact is that some of our common medications (especially phenylbutazone) are illegal in some European countries, in part because horses are part of their food chain and they’re a bit nervous about drugs in their meat. If the FEI’s task force succeeds in creating a more realistic drug policy, it will signal a gigantic philosophical shift.
“Hopefully there will be a re-assessment of permission to medicate, a grasping that horses are going to need medication to keep them operating. Their aspect of zero-tolerance is a fallacy,” said Allen, noting that FEI officials are using the USEF’s rules as a guideline.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed for a new international philosophy.