CHRB Votes in Third-Party Lasix After Four-Year Debate

The California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) voted 5-0 on Thursday to enact a comprehensive new set of rules that will require independent, third-party veterinary administration of furosemide (Lasix).

The passage of a revamped Rule No. 1845 (“Authorized Bleeder Medication”) has been four years in the making. Since 2012, the CHRB has studied, debated, tweaked, remanded, and heard hours of conflicting testimony about whether or not private veterinarians with an existing business relationship with trainers should continue to remain involved in giving shots of a commission-regulated medication to horses.

Thursday's vote signaled a change to that status quo: California will now move ahead with joining more than a dozen other jurisdictions in requiring third-party Lasix administration, including the major racing states of New York, Kentucky and Florida.

The rules change will also bring the CHRB into line with policies supported by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium and Association of Racing Commissioners International. And the paradigm is not even entirely new to California–the new third-party CHRB rules share similarities with those that have been previously required by the Breeders' Cup when Santa Anita Park has hosted racing's world championships.

The only remaining bureaucratic hurdle is approval from the state Office of Administrative Law, which must sign off on the new Lasix policies in their entirety.

Although the CHRB considered numerous ways for third-party Lasix to be administered, in the end it left the exact, day-to-day workings up to the state's horsemen and racetracks.

The motion that was voted in requires “racing associations to include a furosemide agreement when submitting an application for license.”

So before the start of each meet in the state, horsemen and track managements will have to come up with a plan for Lasix administration, which could include the hiring of third-party veterinarians or vet technicians who are licensed by both the California Veterinary Medical Board and the CHRB. Having this agreement approved will be a requirement for licensure prior to the CHRB allowing a meet to proceed.

“Most of the tracks have been in contact with me about how this is going to work and ideas on how to put this together, and I think they expect to consult with myself and the board on how these [agreements] are going to be organized going forward,” said Rick Arthur, DVM, the CHRB equine medical director.

Arthur underscored that the needs for third-party Lasix administration are going to be markedly different at the fair meet at Ferndale, where the fields and stable area are both small, compared to Del Mar, where more horses race over a longer meet and the barn area is much larger.

“One size doesn't fit all, and we're going to have to be flexible,” Arthur said.

“There are different models for doing this. In some tracks back East, there are actually [vet] practices that provide this service, and that's the only service they provide on the racetrack,” Arthur explained. “NYRA, for example: they hire the veterinarians to [administer Lasix], and it's usually a part-time job…In Kentucky, where the commission veterinarians do it, it's a full-time job…but [commission administration of Lasix] is not our model.”

Arthur said a key component of the new rules will be that the administrator of the injection must not have had a veterinarian-client relationship with the licensee whose horse is receiving Lasix for up to 30 days prior to the shot.

Chief among the reasons that states have been adopting third-party Lasix administration rules, several board members pointed out, is transparency. Vets with an implicit financial interest in how a trainer's horses perform should not be involved in giving shots of a commission-regulated medication, they argued.

The CHRB heard more than an hour of testimony prior to voting, and like at previous meetings where the topic was on the agenda, private-practice veterinarians spoke out vociferously in opposition to the new rules.

Some of the vets who testified were direct about voicing their fears of lost income over not being able to give Lasix shots. Others chose to frame their arguments against third-party Lasix by pointing out potential flaws with the methodology.

Among the topics raised were: How would the Lasix syringes be collected and tested? What if there was an emergency with the horse while it was being injected that a third-party administrator couldn't handle? Would the new regulations wrongly malign private vets as dishonest cheaters? How would the CHRB determine whether or not the administrators of Lasix were also injecting something else? Or if the administrators were covertly betting on the races?

Other vets who testified rolled back the discussion to the efficacy of Lasix and what it does to racehorses–a line of discussion that CHRB chairman Chuck Winner tried to stifle, because those topics had already been debated ad nauseum in the previous four years.

“I don't want to cut you off, but we want to stick to the measure that's before us,” Winner said at one point. “We are out of step with the industry…We went out of our way to work with the [state] veterinary board; we went out of our way to solve some of these problems and issues that have been raised time and time and time again.”

Commissioner Madeline Auerbach agreed.

“Every time we get a response to this, we get these same obfuscations [from vets],” Auerbach said. “And I think that's unfortunate, because it doesn't allow us to move through the process, get it handled, and eventually do what's right for the industry…Our scope of responsibility on this board is to do what's best for the horse, the rider, and the industry. And this is an industry concern. And I would have thought that the majority of vets would like to have been partners with us on helping determine that [rather than making] the same arguments over and over again that we've already addressed.”

Commissioner Richard Rosenberg abstained from the vote. Commissioner Steve Beneto was absent from the meeting.