California medication rule changes boil down to expanded withdrawal times

On Thursday, the California Horse Racing Board voted to suspend the authorized thresholds for 11 medications, a variety of painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs that are commonly administered to horses around the world. The threshold suspension is part of a plan to address a spate of deaths this winter at Santa Anita Park and the fierce backlash to the breakdowns from within and outside the racing industry.

So what exactly does that mean for trainers, veterinarians, and horses?

In practice, it likely means that fewer of the drugs with suspended thresholds will be prescribed and administered to horses racing at Santa Anita Park and Golden Gate Fields, the only tracks in California impacted by the ruling, and that those drugs will be administered farther away from race time.

To most racing regulators, that’s probably a good thing: The two classes of drug targeted by the suspensions – non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and corticosteroids – probably have the most potential to interfere with a horse’s ability to display or feel pain in bones and joints, and if the goal is to reduce breakdowns, it’s a fitting avenue for some road work.

The authorized thresholds for the drugs – which exist in some shape or form in jurisdictions around the world – were put in place in order to balance veterinary needs with safety needs, since the drugs in question do have legitimate uses in veterinary medicine but are also problematic when their effects can influence either a veterinary exam or a racing or workout performance.

Under the previous thresholds, veterinarians in California used a 24-hour limit on the administration of phenylbutazone, a popular painkiller, with slightly longer limits on other regulated painkillers. For corticosteroids – anti-inflammatories that are most powerful when injected directly into a joint – the limit was seven days out from a race for those types of administrations, according to veterinarians and regulators.

Dr. Jeff Blea, a leading racetrack veterinarian in Southern California who is also the head of the Racing Committee of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, said on Friday that the practical impact of the suspension of the authorized thresholds will be to expand the withdrawal times of both classes of drugs. For phenylbutazone, the limit will now be 48 hours – a limit that the AAEP and other racing regulatory organizations have been trying to implement anyway – and for intra-articular injections of corticosteroids, the limit will now be 14 days, Blea said.

“The rules are pretty easy to follow,” Blea said. “It’s not a big deal. It’s pretty black and white, and it isn’t the end of the world. And I think it is better for the horses.”

The new rules will also prohibit the “stacking” of painkillers, a term that refers to administering one or more NSAIDs within the withdrawal guidelines to get a more potent effect but still test below the regulatory limits for each of the drugs. The practice was already regulated, but Blea said that the new policies would rule out administering any other painkiller within approximately one week of the other.

The impacts of the new policies were communicated to Santa Anita’s backstretch veterinary community at a closed-door meeting last week, nine days prior to the CHRB meeting, Blea said. The presenters at the meeting included top executives at The Stronach Group, the owner of Santa Anita and Golden Gate, including Belinda Stronach, the chairman of the company, and Tim Ritvo, the chief operating officer.

The only misgiving that Blea had about the new policies is that veterinarians were not included in the discussions that led up to the changes. While Blea said that might lead to some logistical problems, he also said that “it’s something we can live with.” There are approximately 12 to 15 practicing vets on the Santa Anita backstretch, Blea said.

Blea and other regulatory officials also stated that the new rules may have some impact on the ability of the racing office to hustle horses for races that are added to overnight sheets, since some horses that may not have been pointing for a specific race in the condition book could have been administered a corticosteroid within two weeks of the new race being added.

Technically, the suspension of the thresholds could lead some to think that the drugs are now “zero-tolerance drugs,” a term that is thrown around with some regularity to indicate drugs that are not allowed to be in a horse’s system during a race. But that’s not the case.

“There is no such thing as zero tolerance,” Dr. Rick Arthur, the equine medical director for the CHRB, said on Friday morning. “What we are saying is that there are no longer authorized thresholds.”

That’s because racing laboratories around the world use what are called screening limits when testing for drugs, a demarcation line based on the concentration of the drug used to determine whether the substance is considered a reportable positive or not. Those screening limits will remain in place at California’s drug-testing laboratory for all the drugs that no longer have authorized thresholds, according to regulators familiar with the impact of the new rule, as well as for the hundreds of other drugs routinely targeted in post-race tests.

The bottom line, though, remains the same. California veterinarians and horsemen are facing more restrictive rules for both painkillers and corticosteroids.

“If the impact is that less horses break down, that’s a good thing,” said one racing regulator who did not want to be identified when commenting on another jurisdiction’s rules. “I think they are trying to change the culture.”