What is being done to ensure a level playing field for horses and horsemen? That was a key question discussed at the American Association of Equine Practitioners’ Racing Forum on Dec. 3 during the group’s annual convention in Seattle, Wash. An update from the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium (RMTC) indicated that 30 racing jurisdictions are considering, or have adopted, the consortium’s guidelines, but there are still hurdles to overcome. Those include setting benchmarks for screening techniques for drug tests to which all racing labs must conform, determining threshold levels for therapeutic medications, and funding laboratories so they can perform uniform testing based on standards accepted by the industry.

“All of us (on the track) want to know where the lines are, and we can live with that,” said Rick Arthur, a California racetrack practitioner who serves on the RMTC. That got murmurs of agreement throughout the standing-room-only crowd of about 75 people.

There are 47 therapeutic medications the consortium has said need to have threshold levels and withdrawal times established, according to information from the consortium presented by Kevin Dunlavy, DVM, and Bruce Soloman, DVM, of Kentucky, who moderated the forum. The consortium has funded $621,000 in research at six universities to establish efficacy and tests to determine abuse of drugs including Erythropoietin (EPO), zinconotide (cone snail venom), and ethanol. Research on those three substances has been conducted and should be released to the public after publication in scientific journals.

Arthur noted that the research on withdrawal times will help states save money since “80% of positives are residues for legitimate therapeutic drugs. We can put our resources to more effective use.”
There is a two-day workshop scheduled next month that will be the only international conference on racing analytical data for drug testing. The RMTC recently did an “extensive” survey of the 18 laboratories used by North America’s 38 racing jurisdictions to help shape the goals for post-race testing