Originally Posted by
Danno
[VVV] G'day Dan,
Mate, it's not ignorance, rather it's just a common misnomer.
I guess you could call them any number of things other than any name that suggests or states that they actually 'mask' the presence of another substance..because they do not. Interference agents perhaps?
That being said, rather than such substances being the main reason to point to as to why anyone who chose to walk down that road might continue to skate by on testing, there is another far more likely Boogey Man lurking in the bushes.
It is a fact that completely unrelated types of drugs which nevertheless have completely like pharmacological effects can be administered to horses in micro doses. This is termed 'stacking'...a process whereby such drugs are effectively 'stacked' one atop of the other in order to achieve the desired result that otherwise a full dose of any single one of them would have achieved...only by way of having been 'stacked'... individually none of them will be present in a large enough amounts to cause a positive test to occur.
To put it in very simple terms...you can for example, as a Human, decide to take small doses of Panadol, Aspirin and Nurofen and do it all at the same time in order to achieve an overall pain killing/anti-inflamatory effect...while chemically speaking each of those drugs is completely unrelated to the other two. US & CAN Vets have been doing this with both equine related & I guess various other drugs for quite some time.
To some degree I think our testing regime is different here and I suspect it might well pick up at least some attempts at this practice...however I'm sure you get the picture.
Nevertheless, and without going so far as to put a blue print on here of how to be a dodgy bastard insofar as adopting the practice here, a Vet of similar dodgy views and with some reasonable insight into how to apply it could get any horse tuned up, no problems at all.
Like all such things, I suspect it all depends on what you are willing to pay in order to do so and how bent the Vet is. Fortunately here in Australia, at least to my knowledge, bent Vets are few & far between. That is far from being the case in the US however.
PS. This is what the authorities in NJ & NY are suggesting Lou Pena's Vet/s has/have been doing.