From a distance, the image of Las Vegas is magic. Bright lights, dreamy-eyed tourists, the glamour of the Strip. But it's all an illusion. Up close, the truth is harder to hide. And the truth is that it's a perfectly designed village of masochism.
There's just enough pleasure to keep you happy, just the right amount of possibilities to keep you pressing your luck. Never mind that you arrive herded like cattle, routinely find yourself trapped in huge buildings designed to impede exit and generally leave with a dent in your net worth, if not your moral compass.
It's the temporary abandonment of everything that's real for the infinitesimal chance at fantasy. It's a place of bad judgment.
So maybe it should come as no surprise that the commission that regulates mixed martial arts there—the one that is perhaps the most influential in the nation—remains such a disaster.
The Nevada State Athletic Commission proved it again on Monday, handing UFC star Nick Diaz a five-year suspension for his third positive drug test result in Nevada. The ban is among the longest ever handed down by a state commission to a mixed martial artist and represents an unconscionable act of injustice.
A third drug-test failure sounds bad on the surface. It sounds terrible, actually, but all three of those positive results were for marijuana. In a time that most of the country is moving to decriminalize the drug, Nevada—which just opened its first legal dispensary about a month ago, by the way—doubled down with a penalty that surpassed its own recently overhauled rules and guidelines that have yet to go into effect.
In fact, the commission didn't just surpass its own suggestion; it essentially laughed it off, giving Diaz a penalty that exceeded the recommended 36-month ban by 67 percent. He also received a fine of 33 percent of his $500,000 fight purse, costing him $165,000.
Why did NAC take this step? In a word, it was angry that Diaz has continually flouted its authority. Commissioner Pat Lundvall said as much when she recounted his 2007 and 2012 failures.
"We're now in 2015, and it doesn't appear that any of these proceedings have had an impact on the athlete, and it doesn't appear that the athlete is afforded the respect that this commission and the opportunity and the privilege for him to fight in the state then affords," she said.
By comparison, when Chael Sonnen stood in front of NAC last July and admitted to knowingly ingesting five performance-enhancers—anastrozole, clomiphene, human growth hormone (HGH), recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)—he received a two-year ban. Like Diaz, Sonnen had a suspension history, but he had admitted to using another PED (testosterone) in his past, yet his penalty was a fraction. In addition, Diaz's opponent at UFC 183, Anderson Silva, who tested positive for PEDs drostanolone and androsterone, received only a one-year ban.
That uneven discipline is intrinsically problematic. This is a sport heavy on trauma. Candidly, it is the hurt business, yet NAC has chosen to penalize a weed smoker as a felon while PED users have historically walked away as misdemeanor stumblebums. Silva, for example, will be eligible to fight in four months. Diaz will be eligible to fight in 2020.
As bad as the uneven discipline is the fact that Diaz actually mounted a strong defense that was summarily ignored.
As it turns out, the 32-year-old Diaz was tested three times on fight night, January 31, submitting samples at 7:12 p.m., 10:38 p.m. and 11:55 p.m.
The first and third of those samples were taken by a WADA-accredited lab, Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory (SMRTL). The second was taken by a non-WADA lab, Quest Diagnostics. Guess which one resulted in a positive?
Diaz had marijuana in his system; that much is clear. But both his first and third samples were well under the 150 ng/mL threshold for a positive test. The first was 49.731 ng/mL; the third 61.104 ng/ml.
The second? That number somehow ballooned to 733.23 ng/mL, a result 15 times higher than his first sample and well over the threshold. While Nevada deputy attorney general Christopher Eccles suggested that Diaz diluted his sample in the interim between the second and third tests, Diaz's attorney Lucas Middlebrook and an expert witness he called argued that it would require ingesting so much fluid that Diaz would have been suffering from severe water intoxication.
Diaz's medical expert, Dr. Hani Khella, proclaimed the variations "not medically plausible," saying Diaz would have had to consume around 30 glasses of water in the 77-minute span between tests to dilute his sample, putting him in danger of water intoxication. He also stated his belief that the Quest collector mishandled Diaz's sample and did not properly document chain of custody.
In an arena that has seen shockingly inept defenses (see Silva, Anderson), Diaz's legal team presented his defense professionally and, though occasionally exhibiting frustration, seemed to hint Diaz would appeal in civil court.
He would be wise to do so. NAC has used SMRTL in the past, and in choosing to honor the outlier test, the commission has unwittingly undermined its own testing program. WADA, after all, has always been the gold standard, but on Monday, NAC avoided that uncomfortable truth.
"You simply can't take three tests, ignore the two that you don't like and then hang onto the one that came in outrageously out of whack to the other two," Middlebrook said in his summation.
That seemed reasonable enough, but not for the NAC. If it wanted to punish Diaz for lying on his pre-fight questionnaire, it could have done that. Instead, the commission punished him for everything else that came before it, maybe for everyone else that has come before him.
In the end, Nick Diaz was done before he ever stepped foot into the building. Justice was just another Vegas mirage. It's the bleakest place on earth, where the house always wins and dreams go to die.
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