Last night, suspended UFC welterweight and middleweight fighter Nick Diaz tweeted this out:
@ufc put me in touch with their lawyers at Campbell & Williams and they will also be helping me with the NSAC
— nick diaz (@nickdiaz209) September 30, 2015
Diaz was suspended a few weeks back by the Nevada Athletic Commission stemming from a marijuana test failure the night of his fight with Anderson Silva in January. The commission’s treatment Diaz during his hearing has become the source of much outrage among mixed martial arts fans, writers, and fighters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCuD9G9Zbq4
Diaz took three tests that night, one before and two after the fight. The first and last test passed easily under the current threshold of 150 nanograms per milliliter, while the middle test was an astounding 733 nanograms per milliliter. F0r reference, when Diaz tested positive the night of his fight with Takanori Gomi, he was at 175 nanograms per milliliter. The negative tests were performed at the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory, a World Anti-Doping Association approved lab, while the positive test was performed at Quest Diagnostics, which is not. The positive Quest sample was also labelled with Diaz’s name instead of an identification number.
The commissioners appeared to take issue with Diaz mounting a credible defense disregard all of the evidence that suggested that the positive test was such an extreme outlier it shouldn’t be considered a positive. UFC’s new “drug czar,” Jeff Novitzky, told UFC fighter Josh Samman that he would have thrown out the result in an interview posted at Bloody Elbow. “I didn’t hear an explanation behind [the commission giving Diaz a five year suspension]. But I think all that is moot, because looking at those three tests, I don’t think that there should have been a positive test to begin with.”
