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I'd be curious how many horses really are Lasix dependent. We have no idea currently. Horses are forced to use it because if they don't they are at a competitive disadvantage. That is how we got where we are in the now!
I would think some reasonably smart people could come up with a plan where horses that really need Lasix get penalized, and the only real way to do that is by adding weight. Jerry Brown of Thorograph is the first I saw suggest this. But we've already seen it tried in the Pegasus and it didn't do much.
In the first running, one horse took the five pound weight break and that was a shipper from I believe South America that was never a factor and finished last. In the second and third years, it was upped to seven pounds with no takers. I don't know where you would start, but it clearly has to be much more than seven.
Trainers for the most part are not dumb. They know seven pounds is not enough to make up for losing Lasix. Maybe I'd start at 12 pounds and go from there. It would probably take some trial and error. Maybe 12 is the number, maybe it would turn out seven was good, but we won't know unless we try. What we don't want to do is lose a bunch of horses that can't race without Lasix because we have a horse shortage as it is.
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