JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE DOESN'T ENDORSE HEROIN

Last month, The Observer Music Monthly ran an interview with Justin Timberlake, in which he spoke about drucks:

I'm just like everyone else, I get completely plastered, I've done my fair share of drugs and I've been caught places with my pants down; it's just I make sure there are no cameras around. If we get into this whole [drugs] conversation we don't have enough time. Some drugs haven't been legalised because it will ruin the other drugs, like nicotine and tobacco. Nicotine is more addictive than heroin. I'll leave the preaching to the preachers - my grandfather's a preacher - but I believe you don't do anything to excess. They always say too much of a good thing could be a bad thing. I try to live my life in a well-rounded manner. We all make mistakes.'

Of course, this sort of thing is almost unheard of - wholesome stars speaking honestly and in an informed way about drugs.

You could almost hear the sound of a record label imploding. Why, he might as well have said that it's okay to fill a baby with heroin and for three-year-old children to have crack pumped into their eye-sockets.

The upshot? Now he's suggesting that he's been misquoted:

Timberlake also addressed the recent interview he did with the U.K.'s Observer Music Monthly magazine, in which he said he's taken drugs and that "nicotine is more addictive than heroin."

"I'll just say this, and I'm not attacking anyone, but the interesting thing about a lot of magazine interviews that you do is that you get asked questions, and you get asked them a specific way, and you have a specific way [of answering], like we're having a conversation, and you make a statement like, 'It's a proven fact that nicotine is more addictive than heroin,' " he explained. "And then you keep going through the conversation and then they ask you another question and you say, 'Look, I'm not hear to preach to anybody, I just say don't do anything in excess, don't get carried away with anything.' The next thing I see is like, 'Heroin is safer than cigarettes.' And I'm like, 'Who in their right mind would think that?'

"The thing you have to realize and not get bent out of shape about is the press is gonna say what the press wants to say," he continued. "And they're gonna make a big deal out of the things they want to make a big deal out of. I know what I said. I know how I said it. If the conversation was printed there would be no room for misquote or error. But you can't worry about it. At the end of the day, who cares? The only thing I care about is that I can get my music out."

So, has Timberlake actually been misquoted? After all, his beef appears to be that he was quoted as saying "heroin is safer than cigarettes" - which would have been a bending out of shape of what he said. But the article never claimed that he did - it merely reported that he said 'nicotine is more addictive than heroin', words that Timberlake agrees he said. The selective misquoting and bending of meaning actually seems to be coming from Justin when he talks about the Observer Music Magazine, and not in Camilla Long's original OMM piece.

Bending the facts in a bid to claim you've been misquoted? Now, that's elan.

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