My mother always wanted me to go to law school. It’s a bummer I didn’t listen to her. I’d almost certainly have an high paying job by now. Instead, I walk around in my boxer shorts in a studio apartment rummaging the refrigerator at 5:00am because I’m too busy playing video games to sleep. If priorities had an Olympics, I’d probably fail to get my physical conducted in time to register for the competition. However, if MMA had an Olympics, Nick Diaz should be the 170lb athlete that represents America; and according to his attourney, Ross C. Goodman, there’s no way an international anti-doping committee would recognize the NSAC’s bogus drug test results.
“Nick Diaz tested for the presence of its metabolite, called “THC carboxylic acid,” which is an inactive ingredient of marijuana metabolite, which can stay in your system stored in your fat tissues for weeks, up to months, after use of marijuana. Most people understand that [the] psychological effects of marijuana after smoking it wear off within two to six hours. That is what the commission, the regulatory agencies, are concerned about because you don’t want somebody fighting under the influence or impaired by a psychoactive substance. Once that active ingredient wears off within two to six hours of use, then all that’s left are the residual metabolites from the metabolism of the marijuana stored in somebody’s fat tissues, which is not a controlled substance, which is not psychoactive, which is simply an inactive metabolite which has no impact on an athlete.
Of course, it’s directly related from marijuana use, but the point is this: it’s not only Nevada, the World Anti-Doping Agency and most other regulatory bodies only prohibit the active ingredient of marijuana in-competition and not out-of-competition. So that’s an important distinction that I think everybody has to make, and, again, Nick Diaz didn’t test for marijuana, only marijuana metabolite and marijuana metabolite itself, it’s not prohibited, both in Nevada and by the world Anti-Doping Agency, which is the international organization that monitors and regulates sports competitions. Nick Diaz did not violate any rule by having an inactive metabolite in his post-fight urine test.
It’s as simple as that. If you’re under the influence of marijuana, which everybody agrees an athlete shouldn’t be in-competition, then it would show when you take a post-fight urine test. It would show for THC, for the active ingredient of marijuana, as opposed to residual metabolites, which could come from consuming marijuana weeks, if not months, before the fight. Because marijuana is one of those substances which has such a long detection window, longer than almost any other drug that we know, and because it’s water soluble and it has the capacity to just stay in your fat tissues, there’s no rational basis to prohibit somebody, especially in this case, when you legally consume it weeks before the fight. And it has no effect whatsoever on that athlete’s performance, and it’s not considered a prohibited substance. And, so, that was the basis of our response to the Nevada athletic commission.”
I now know more about Marijuana than I did before I started writing this article, and that means that today is not a total waste. Unfortunately, Marijuana is still illegal in a majority of the country, and my souvenir medical marijuana license from California is about as useful to me as an all expense paid trip to Kabul, Afghanistan. I’m sure it’s nice this time of year, but I’d rather be in California picking Ross Goodman’s brain about making it illegal to wear sunglasses indoors.
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