How would you compare horse racings drug testing policy to the policy of testing human athletes?
Dr. Waterman: In many respects, testing in horse racing is superior to that in human athletics. Generally, equine testing laboratories analyze samples for a far wider variety of drugs and many more samples are tested than in human athletics. At least every winner of every race in the U.S. has a post-race sample collected (either blood, urine or in many cases both)and in most states, the stewards have the power to send additional horses to the test barn following the race. This means that approximately 200,000 horses are sampled throughout the country every year- an average of 1.74 per race. In New York, four horses out of every race are tested. At any given time, laboratories may be screening for hundreds of chemical compounds including local anesthetics, tranquilizers and anesthetic agents, narcotics, stimulants, beta agonists, non-narcotic analgesics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, corticosteroids, anabolic steroids and other classes of potentially performance effecting drugs
