If a fighter tests positive for performance enhance drugs, I say throw the book at them. It is cheating to get an unfair advantage and it should not be tolerated.
Of course, every single fighter caught is going to claim they took them by accident, but this excuse is becoming so common that it is completely and utterly meaningless. In my mind, any fighter who comes up with this claim instantly becomes a liar as well as a cheat.
Testing positive for illegal or recreational drugs is completely different. Diaz tested positive for marijuana after his win over Takanori Gomi in 2007 and one idiot of an athletic commissioner named Tony Alamo said afterwards:
I was there at this fight and believe that you were intoxicated and… that it made you numb to the pain. Did it help you win? I think it did.
If he is right then the message for aspiring young MMA fighters everywhere is to smoke pot because it will make you a better fighter and allow you to pull off gogoplata wins against the No. 1-ranked lightweight in the world.
Fortunately he is wrong. Embarrassingly, painfully wrong.
Getting stoned does not make you a better fighter and there is no way Diaz would get stoned immediately before a fight because, unlike Alamo, he knows perfectly well that it would severely impair his performance.
If the athletic commissions are going to test for marijuana, then they might as well test for alcohol while they are at it. Both are recreational substances and their legality varies in different parts of the world. Both have absolutely no beneficial effects for an athlete.
I can see George St-Pierre testing positive for alcohol after enjoying a glass of red wine with his cheese two weeks before a fight and Alamo announcing that “I was at the fight and I believe the alcohol made him braver, more confident and numb to the pain…”
When the UFC went to Abu Dhabi, they didn’t test athletes for alcohol, despite it being illegal there. Marijuana is legal under certain circumstances in the US and therefore the athletic commissions have no business to be testing for its presence and punishing fighters when they find it.
Cristiane Santos is a cheat, being much more muscular than any other women obviously helped her win fights and she used PEDs to build that impressive body. Nick Diaz is not a cheat, he’s just a man that likes to smoke a few bowls every now and again.
The athletic commission needs to make up its mind. Either marijuana is a PED in which case Nick Diaz should be banned and kids everywhere who want to be top-level professional fighters should go out, buy some and start smoking it.
Or, it is a recreational drug which has no positive effects whatsoever on performance, we can keep telling children to “just say no” and Diaz deserves, at the very worst, a slap on the wrist for failing to fill out his form properly.
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