Mavericks owner Cuban takes pro-steroid stance - report

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told a group of American university students that he is in favour of supervised steroid use for athletes.

Speaking at a student forum at the University of Pittsburgh, Cuban said his "common sense" tells him that athletes could benefit from using steroids if they were made legal, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Wednesday.

Cuban said athletes could use steroids to recover from injuries as long as a doctor is supervising the programme and it could be insured there were no long-term harmful side effects.

"I will get killed for saying this ... but I'm not so against steroids," Cuban said. "We do performance-enhancing things all the time, just not steroids.

"If you administer them properly and fairly and set the rules strictly as long as in doing so we recognize there are no negative long-term health impact issues.

"Sometimes, you just put the blinders on because it came from underground. Rather than saying, 'what's the best way to do this and is there a positive out of it?' We just dismiss it."

The controversial Cuban also boasted to the students that he has been fined more than 1.5 million dollars by the National Basketball Association.

"Maybe because I don't have to deal with it that it is an uninformed comment," Cuban said. "but I think my position is common sense."

Cuban said he doesn't expect any of the American professional sports leagues to abandon their steroid-testing programmes anytime soon.

"You have to get to the point where that risk isn't there and we are not there yet," he said.

Orlando Magic forward Rashard Lewis was slapped with a 10-game suspension in August for violating the NBA's drug policy.

NBA players are randomly tested four times each season under the league's Anti-Drug Agreement.

The first positive test for steroids results in a 10-game suspension.

The second positive test is a 25-game suspension and the third positive test is a one-year suspension.