Warren on Nick Diaz: 'You break a law, you've got to deal with it'

On Monday, it was announced that fan favourite Nick Diaz was suspended for five years by the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC) after testing positive for marijuana metabolites for the third time in his career.

Diaz, now 32-years-old, hired a New York-based law firm to challenge the irregular testing results after his fight with Anderson Silva at UFC 183. The Californian passed two out of three drug tests on the night of UFC 183, and Diaz's lawyer, Lucas Middlebrook, presented the NAC with a compelling case.

The Commission, however, decided to ignore Middlebrook's defense and quite clearly launched a personal vendetta against Diaz. As well as serving a five year suspension, the former Strikeforce welterweight champion was also fined 30% of his $500,000 fight purse.

The suspension has elicited outage from the MMA community, and many fans and fighters have offered their support for Diaz on social media. One fighter who isn't overly sympathetic with the Cesar Gracie Jiu-Jitsu student is Joe Warren. The former Bellator featherweight and bantamweight champion spoke to MMAJunkie on Tuesday.

"That's terrible for him. It's a law, though. I'm the first one to say, you break a law, you've got to deal with it," Warren said.

"He's done it three times, and there's offenses after the first offense. So we all know this. It sucks that they're doing this because of THC - it's not a performance-enhancing drug, and it's legal in most of the states that we live in. But it's the law, and he knows it, and we all know the law. It sucks."

Diaz failed two previous drug tests for marijuana metabolites when he fought Carlos Condit in 2012 and Takanori Gomi in 2007. It's expected that the Stockton local will challenge the suspension in a court of law.