Updated Sep 15, 2015 at 2:26p ET
On Monday, the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) handed down a hefty fine and five-year suspension to the Nick Diaz for testing positive for marijuana before his Jan. 31 middleweight fight against Anderson Silva.
Well, sort of.
Diaz was tested three times the night of that fight, Jan. 31 — twice before the bout, and once afterwards. He passed the first (conducted at 7:12 p.m.) and third test (conducted at 11:50 p.m.), which were administered by a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited laboratory.
The second test, administered at 10:39 p.m., was handled by a non-WADA accredited company. Diaz's lawyer did a good job pointing out the obvious problem with the commission using two different testing companies, each with different standards and accreditations. The tests produced vastly different results over a very short period of time, with only one supporting the idea that Diaz was, in fact, "guilty" of violating Nevada's drug competition drug policies.
Diaz's marijuana metabolite levels on Jan. 31 were as follows — at 7:12 p.m. he passed with a 48.73 ng/ml level. At 10:39 p.m. he failed with a 733.23 ng/ml level.
Then, less than an hour later, he passed the third test with a 61.04 ng/ml level. The first and third test results, the two administered by a WADA-accredited lab, and both of which Diaz passed, seem consistent with another.
It is only the middle test — administered by a non-WADA accredited lab — that he supposedly failed. Is it significant that the non WADA-accredited lab came back with the outlier result for Diaz?
Why did Nevada choose to take the extraordinary steps of testing Diaz three times in a matter of hours, only to effectively use different standards for the tests? Is it reasonable to believe that Diaz smoked marijuana after 7:12 p.m. and before 10:39, then somehow un-smoked between 10:39 p.m. and 11:50 p.m.?
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These questions were all essentially posed during Diaz's hearing in front of the NSAC, and are good ones which the commission — not restricted in their hearings by usual and proper legal proceeding standards — effectively refused to consider. Of course, that was not surprising since exonerating Diaz would have meant the commission admitting that they messed up in their testing protocol.
So, Diaz was suspended because he tested positive for banned levels of marijuana metabolites in his system Jan. 31.
Maybe.
Let's act for a moment as if the NAC had done a consistent and unimpeachable job of testing Diaz and the rest of the UFC 183 card last winter, however. Let's assume that Diaz did indeed have more weed in his system than is allowed, as he's twice before been busted for doing.
He received a five-year suspension for it. Nick Diaz received a five-year suspension for marijuana a couple weeks after his opponent that night, Anderson Silva, received a one-year suspension for repeatedly testing positive for steroids.
In fact, Silva tested positive for steroids during his training camp for the Diaz fight, but was still allowed to step into the cage and repeatedly hit his opponent with his enhanced body.
Diaz was given a five-year suspension for marijuana nine months or so after Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine during his last training camp, was still allowed to fight Daniel Cormier, and then given no punishment at all by the commission, afterwards. Diaz was barred from making a living for five years a little over a year after the NAC licensed Vitor Belfort — a repeated PED offender, who ignored a previous suspension of the commission, and then hid from real sanctioning for years — in order to fight in a lucrative world title bout against Chris Weidman.
Diaz was suspended five years for marijuana less than two years after repeated steroid offender Josh Barnett was licensed by them. A big condition of Barnett's license was that he be subject to random WADA-certified drug testing (Nevada uses WADA as a standard for trusted drug testing, but when Diaz passed two WADA-certified tests, a third test with different standards was the one used to determine his guilt).
It is important to remember that, because other states respect one another's suspensions (as does the UFC, typically), Nevada's commission ruling Monday means that unless the UFC releases Diaz to fight abroad, or he wins promised legal appeals, he won't be able to fight again until 2020.
At 32 years of age, and in the 14th year of his professional MMA career, five years is essentially a career death sentence for Diaz. The fighter was despondent, afterwards, while talking to our Heidi Fang.
"They've deprived me of not just of money now, but the right to stand up for not only what I believe in, but for my little brother [UFC lightweight Nate Diaz, who Nick will likely not be allowed to corner in his upcoming fight against Michael Johnson because of the suspension]," he said.
"I can't even go and help my little brother."
Serious consequences and sentences should only be meted out as a result of fair, adversarial proceedings which are dictated by consistent guidelines. Nevada's testing protocols are all over the place, right now, producing very different results for the same fighters on the same days.
That's a problem of process, and as a nation of laws, there are few things more important than proper process in disciplinary and criminal proceedings.
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More than that, however, even if we accept the commission's hodge-podge process, Nevada's punishments are also inconsistent to an alarming point. The world's most important athletic commission is establishing an erratic reputation for itself by handing out drug punishments that swing wildly from lenient to severe, seemingly without a sense of proportionate danger posed to the athletes involved for different offenses.
Perhaps Nick Diaz shouldn't be fighting with any marijuana metabolites in his system, ever, even though a certain level are allowed. Maybe he has a problem with marijuana.
Or, perhaps he just has problems that are helped by marijuana. That may be why he has legal prescriptions to use it in his home state of California.
I can't be sure one way or another, on those subjects. However, I am sure that there is a certain and much greater structural wrong being done when the world's most influential commission treats marijuana use more harshly than it treats cocaine or steroids.
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