Use of the drug Lasix won’t be permitted in this year’s Kentucky Derby and other Triple Crown races, as the move to ban race-day medication from horse racing expands
The Kentucky Derby returns on the first Saturday in May after a pandemic-year. Fans wearing fancy hats will be back in the stands. America’s most prestigious horse race, however, has implemented one major change: All of this year’s Derby entrants will run without being injected with the drug Lasix for the first time in nearly a half-century.
Lasix, or furosemide, is used to prevent respiratory bleeding—blood entering a horse’s lungs during physical activity—and is also a diuretic that causes horses to urinate several gallons of fluid. The loss of water weight potentially allows a horse to run faster, which critics of Lasix say makes the drug a performance enhancer.
While the use of Lasix in thoroughbreds has been common in North America since the mid-1970s, it is now widely prohibited throughout the rest of the racing world. Lasix, which can be used by humans to mask performance-enhancing drugs, is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s. Animal-rights groups have criticized its use, casting the industry in a harsh light when it already faces many other survival challenges.
Ahead of the Kentucky Derby in 2019, the owners of the three Triple Crown tracks— Churchill Downs Inc . , the Stronach Group and the New York Racing Association, respectively—for horses, initially for 2-year-old races in 2020 and then for all stakes races, including the Triple Crown, in 2021. Lasix is still permitted to be used on horses racing in lower levels of the sport.
“As the host of the Kentucky Derby and a key leader in the racing industry, Churchill Downs has a heightened responsibility to implement the world’s best practices for caring for racehorses at our facilities,” said Bill Carstanjen, chief executive of Churchill Downs Inc., in a statement.