Hovering at the edges of the racing industry, the director explained, was a shady class of people constantly looking for chemicals that could “hop a horse or stop a horse”—make it run faster, or slower. Fentanyl, he said, did the former. The drug was a narcotic when administered to humans; it doped them, slowed them, sent them into a stupor. But it threw horses into a manic rage—cats, too, for that matter. Opioids, in fact, tend to produce strange effects in mammals other than humans. Fentanyl will turn a rat stiff, to the point where you can stand him on his head. A horse on fentanyl will
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