As Bollywood finds itself mired in various drug use allegations, director Karan Johar said that he has never engaged in any narcotic consumption nor encouraged it.

In a statement released on Twitter, Johar slammed the 'malicious and slanderous' campaign in the form of news reports on his alleged drug consumption after a video featuring him and several others including actors Arjun Kapoor, Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone among others, went viral.

Negating the claim, he wrote: "Certain news channels, print/ electronic media and social media platform(s) are wrongly and misleadingly reporting that narcotics were consumed at a party that I, Karan Johar hosted on July 28, 2019 at my residence. I had already clarified my position way back in 2019 that the allegations were false."

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— Karan Johar (@karanjohar) September 25, 2020

Johar also denied having any personal relationship with two people being probed by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) amid the ongoing drug investigation by the agency.

"Several media/news channels have been airing news reports that Kshitij Prasad and Anubhav Chopra are my 'aides'/'close aides'. I would like to place on record that I do not know these individuals personally and neither of these two individuals are 'aides' or 'close aides'," he further wrote.

The director has to also face the heat following the demise of actor Sushant Singh Rajput on being an 'enabler' of nepotism in the industry, lost a record number of social media followers in June this year, and had relatively gone off the grid for a while amid the uproar.

Meanwhile, the NCB  questioned Tollywood actress Rakul Preet Singh yesterday after her name came up in the probe and is likely to question actresses Deepika Padukone, Shraddha Kapoor and Sara Ali Khan shortly.