Santa Anita Cancels Thursday Card; LATEST: Racing Suspended

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Kasept

You're spouting off nonsense without a single shred of evidence. What is your source for thinking horses are using more drugs of any kind? Give me a study. Give me historical context. You're 100% wrong. The list of permissible medications has been drilled down to a handful from hundreds. The withdrawl times have been drilled down continually from nearly immediate pre-race to 48, 72 hours or more.

I'd also like to hear what exactly you think any of these alleged medication-related innovations will do to stop the actual cheaters? All they do in reality is give the cheaters a BIGGER advantage. And, simultaneously, cost owners MORE (not less like Rupert insanely suggests)..

I agree with you that if the cheaters keep cheating, they will have an even bigger edge if we eliminate all the legal drugs. That is 100% true. What we need to do is spend way more on security to try to catch the cheaters. In Hong Kong they have great security. I highly doubt there is anywhere close to as much cheating there as there is here. I understand that we don't have as much money to spend as they do, but we could certainly spend more than we are spending right now.

I heard that in Australia they have a machine that can test for like 10,000 different drugs. In this country we only test for around 20 different drugs. The machine in Australia costs $1 million. They should get one here. In addition, we need to hire more investigators to patrol the stable area. They should also put in tons of cameras all over the place.

I think we should either eliminate or at least cut way down on joints being injected. If a guy wants to inject an ankle, at the very least the state vet should have to do an x-ray or some type of imaging and then make the decision as to whether or not it would be safe to inject the ankle. Right now you have private vets injecting ankles, often times without even doing any imaging.

Should bute be illegal? I don't know if it should be totally illegal but I think the amount they give them right now is too much. Right now the dose they give is big enough that you often times can't tell how your horse came out of the race the day after the race. The trainer will tell you flat out(the day after the race) that he has to wait another day or two for all the bute to wear off, to really see how the horse came out of the race. Don't get me wrong. If a horse comes out of a race with a slab fracture, the bute will not mask something that extreme. But it is enough so that an ankle may not puff up for a couple of days. Guys will tell you that giving a horse bute is like a person taking a couple of aspirin. I would be fine with that if it were true but it's obviously not true. As I said before, the dose of bute they give a horse is so big that it will keep swelling down for 2-3 days. That is not the case with a person if they take 2-3 advil or aspirin.

I think we have made some positive changes already. Guys were totally abusing clenbuterol and that has practically been eliminated. That is a good thing. I think the restrictions on shock wave therapy are very positive. I think they have done a lot of good things in New York. We are making some positive changes but I think we can still do way more.

We should look at a place like Hong Kong and basically try to emulate them the best we can, when it comes to drugs and security.

With regard to lasix, I agree with most of what Dr. Arthur says. In this short interview he talks about lasix and other drugs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQw_bB9aO-w