Category: Drugs in Racing

A year ago we wrote a series of stories about seemingly healthy young horses dying on the track. These horses were owned by New Zealand’s recently most prolific buyer of yearlings Steve Stockman, and trainer by either his close friend Steve Telfer, the stable’s North Island man, or by his sister Amanda, who looked after […]

Phenylbutazone – aka Bute – is a drug that can and does cause race horses to die. You can read all about why in the stories that follow. The story right now is the use and clear abuse of the dangerous drug Bute by the Stonewall Stud stable owned by Steve Stockman and managed and […]

Veterinarians in the early 1950s took up phenylbutazone, which they commonly called PBZ, as enthusiastically as their medical counterparts had. They used it to treat joint afflictions, particularly in horses where its anti-inflammatory action countered lameness, the main reason that prevented a horse’s ability to work or to be ridden in sport or recreation. Phenylbutazone was relatively cheap, […]

Concern about “doping” in horseracing came to the fore at the turn of the twentieth century, with controls that aimed to ensure fairness. The overarching powers of the British Jockey Club allowed them to ban “doping” from 1903 and introduce very severe punishments for trainers. The term “doping” was adopted from racing in the US; […]

That there were species differences in the rates at which phenylbutazone was metabolised had been known since the early 1950s (Burns et al. 1953), but this knowledge seems to have had little impact amongst veterinarians. There was no citation of the Burns et al. (1960) paper in the veterinary literature before the early 1970s (see Bogan 1972; […]

The growth of veterinary work with non-sporting horses coincided with more reports on the adverse effects of bute in veterinary publications. In 1983, a report of toxicity in ponies described how high doses produced deaths and common side effects were swelling and ulceration of the mouth and gastrointestinal tract (MacAllister 1983). However, thoroughbred horses seemed to tolerate […]

At the height of the horsemeat scandal in 2013, Lees and Toutain (2013) wrote an editorial for Equine Veterinary Education aiming to demonstrate that “the illegal and erratic presence of trace amount residues of phenylbutazone in horse meat is simply not a public health issue” for humans (Editorial 2013, p. 273). Lees and Toutain reviewed the data on pharmacology, […]

The trainer at the centre of this snowstorm is Phil Bobic, an upstanding young form equestrian champion turned highly respected pre-training expert and hobby racehorse trainer out on the Downs. Phil is the most unlikely bloke you would ever expect to be stuck in the middle of a cocaine scandal, and the bad swabs thrown […]