American heartthrob Zac Efron is the news again after he was "violently socked in the mouth by a sketchy transient," TMZ reports.

Police came across the 26-year-old actor and his bodyguard involved in a violent fistfight with several homeless men just after midnight of March 23. After breaking up the brawl, police questioned Efron as to what he was the doing in the sketchy neighborhood of Skid Row at that time of night.

Efron alleged that he and his bodyguard had run out of gas and were waiting on a tow truck. Efron tossed an empty bottle out his car window where it landed next to a group of vagrants. Thinking that Efron threw the bottle at them, the men got angry and confronted the two. Things quickly escalated, and one of the men punched Efron in the mouth. He later said, "It was the hardest I've ever been hit in my life."

Police let both parties go, saying the altercation was "mutual combat." A source at TMZ said that Efron was "obviously intoxicated" at the time.

News sites were quick to speculate as to what Efron was doing in a part of LA that is, according to an article at RadarOnline, "notorious for its' booming drug trade." Efron had been in the news last year involving two short stints in rehab. While it was alleged that he had gone for alcohol issues, sources later reported that he may have been dealing with a cocaine addiction, and that "he liked to 'dabble' in the rave drug Molly."

There was also the case of Efron's mysteriously-broken jaw, in which the actor supposedly slipped on a puddle of water.

Many actors have had their careers, or worse, their lives, destroyed by drugs. Hopefully this incident is not indicative od bad things to come for Zac Efron.