Stan Bergstein's latest column re: steroids...

[JohnTChance]

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Stan Bergstein\'s latest column concerns a recent article in the Washington Post about racing\'s biggest problem: steroids. It can be found at: http://www.harnesstracks.com/commentary.htm

An excerpt:

- - She explained, \"The Web already offers a new generation of steroids designed to avoid current tests.\"

And she gave graphic evidence of just how easy it is to get them.

The Post bought five dietary supplements online - each of which touted its ability to build muscle fast - and sent them to Dr. Catlin for analysis. He found that four of them contained previously unidentified anabolic steroids. Another was discovered only two years ago, and was thought to be in limited circulation.

Dr. Catlin told the Post: \"They are all steroids. They are all going to be effective.\" And they ranged in cost from $50 to $125 a bottle.

The Post story continued: \"This might just be the beginning. Two officials with prominent U.S. dietary supplement companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it is easy for companies to outwit drug testers. \'There\'s an unlimited pool of steroids,\' one official said. \'You could do this for the next 100 years. . . . The longer they don\'t pay attention the more rampant it gets.\'\"

These compounded drugs have put the chemists far ahead of the testers, in professional sports and just as surely in racing. As Ms. Shipley points out, they can do it \"just by slightly altering the chemical properties of known banned drugs or by turning to long-forgotten recipes from steroid cookbooks from the 1950\'s and 1960\'s.\"

Dr. Catlin said, \"It\'s pretty obvious what\'s going on. The companies are making tons of money. If they don\'t get caught, they turn on the spigot and turn out more.\"

Then this from the Post: \"The supplement company officials said the lenient sentences handed down in the Balco probe seem to have emboldened U.S. companies to delve into the distribution of newly created designer steroids, moving an industry previously the secret domain of black-market chemists, tight-lipped middlemen, and small groups of elite athletes into the mainstream.\"

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[TGJB]

On a related note-- what the heck happened since that big announcement the industry made about hiring a big name guy to police drugs? Anybody heard anything?

[asfufh]

Not a chemist but wondering why:
If Dr Catlin can identify the \"new\" steroids from pill samples, why can\'t Horse Racing\'s drug testers do the same from blood tests of horses?

[BitPlayer]

Not a chemist either, but I\'m guessing it\'s a far simpler matter to isolate ingredients with specific chemical characteristics from the limited number of ingredients in a pill than it is to pick out an infinitesimal quantity of non-natural steroid from the similar natural compounds (and infinite variety of other natural compounds) in a horse\'s blood.