Lee Sun Gyun’s drug tests negative, police correct reports about him admitting to being tricked into use

Actor Lee Sun Gyun is famously being investigated for drug use at the moment, and is also taking legal action against the manager of a hostess bar for blackmailing him. Since then it’s been revealed that his drug tests came back negative, and that reports he admitted to being tricked into drug use were corrected by police.

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So not unlike G-Dragon’s drug test, Lee Sun Gyun’s came back negative as well.

According to the news, “The result of the precise evaluation of his hair was negative.” The police said, “After obtaining a search warrant and collecting about 100 strands of hair to do a test, both marijuana and psychoactive substances were not detected.”
“Considering that it takes about a month to grow 1cm of hair, it means that he did not take drugs for 8-10 months,” the program anchor said. “However, as Lee was threatened and handed over 350 million won, we cannot rule out the case of him taking drugs before the period.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean he didn’t use drugs, but it does mean police don’t have a smoking gun to make a case either.

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Furthermore, it seems like the media is continuing to have difficulty accurately reporting this case. It was initially reported that Lee Sun Gyun told police that he was tricked into using drugs by the hostess bar manager, but the police later denied that he said this.

Previously, according to various Korean media outlets, Lee Sun-kyun was believed to have stated in the second summons that “A gave the drug to me, saying it was prescribed for insomnia.”
The reports said that Lee Sun-kyun also replied, “I didn’t know,” to the police’s question, “Didn’t you know it was a drug?” Because of these reports, it was known to the public that the actor admitted as if he had “not known, but took drugs.”

In an interview with Star News on November 5, a police official said, “Lee Sun-kyun only answered ‘yes’ and ‘don’t know’ in the process of the police asking,” adding, “He did not explicitly describe directly that he was deceived by A or took drugs without knowing.”

Lee Sun Gyun is basically exercising his right to remain silent here, but I still think this will be the defense he will use anyway, because it matters a lot under law whether he knowingly took drugs or not. If the police can’t prove that he took them willingly, then it’ll be hard to punish him, and their best card at the moment (maybe only card) appears to be him paying off the hostess bar manager. Though of course they still have to prove that they just recreationally did drugs together and that she didn’t drug him and then blackmail him.

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Obviously I have no problem believing celebrities would do drugs, whether it’s for fun or just to cope. However, what seemed like an open-and-shut case at the outset slowly seems to be turning into anything but, and the media certainly isn’t helping things by reporting stuff that is later denied and muddying the waters. And that’s really what led to this post, as I hadn’t seen it publicized elsewhere that police actually refuted the recent reports.