MMA legend Royce Gracie does not believe that MMA has a PED problem.

Gracie told MMAFighting.com at Bellator 133 on Friday night.

“It shows that the system is working,” “You’re trying to look at the bad side, I’m looking at the good side. Instead of trying to encourage people, ‘Oh, let’s ban MMA because everybody is doing drugs, let’s ban NASCAR because they’re advertising drinking and driving.’ Let’s look at the good side. The system is working. Let’s not try to put down the fighters because one fighter made a mistake, decided to party and do whatever.”

“How many people got caught [recently]? Five?” Gracie said. “Five of how many we have in the sport all over the world? I don’t think it’s a problem.”

“I feel like the system works,” Gracie said. “It’s good. Let’s not think of the bad side, let’s think it’s the good side. It works.

“The system works. That’s why they’re getting caught.”

Royce Gracie is no stranger to posivited PED testes. On June 14, 2007, the California State Athletic Commission declared that Gracie had tested positive for Nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, after his fight with Kazushi Sakuraba.

According to the California State Athletic Commission, the average person could produce about 2 ng/ml of Nandrolone, while an athlete following “rigorous physical exercise” could have a level of around 6 ng/ml. Both “A” and “B” test samples provided by Gracie “had a level of over 50 ng/ml and we were informed that the level itself was so elevated that it would not register on the laboratory’s calibrator,” said the CSAC.

Gracie was fined $2,500 (the maximum penalty the Commission can impose) and suspended for the remainder of his license, which ended on May 30, 2008. Gracie paid the fine.The California State Athletic Commission’s Bill Douglas told MMAWeekly:

Royce Gracie decided to dispute the allegations during an online video interview on May 2009, more than two years after the fact, saying that his weight in the first UFC event was 178 lb and claiming his weight during his Sakuraba fight was 180 lb, thus only gaining 2 pounds.This was widely disputed by experts as his weight was actually 188 lb for the Sakuraba fight.

According to ESPN “Gracie is hardly possessed of an exaggerated physique, but he was clearly more sculpted for his June 2 fight with Kazushi Sakuraba than he was for a May 2006 match with Matt Hughes. In the former contest, he weighed in at 175 pounds; for Sakuraba, he was 188. One may not need to be nutritionist to observe that a muscle gain of 13 pounds in one year at the age of 40 is a strikingly accomplished feat. Athletes nearing the half-century mark are often happy to maintain functional mass, let alone pack it on”.