Featured Image Credit: Stewart Marsden / Guido Paradisi / Alamy
Topics: Drugs
Tom Sanders
To say that Ozzy Osbourne likes his drugs is, to put it lightly, a bit of an understatement.
Yet despite his infamous love of all things illegal, the Black Sabbath frontman recently admitted that he swore off taking LSD for good in the 70s after spending an hour chatting to a horse - and apparently the horse talked back.
During a recent interview with The Daily Star, the 73-year-old rocker opened up his experiences with LSD and the culture surrounding it.
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“At that time in America, people were very fond of lacing your drinks with acid,” he said. “I didn’t care.”
“I used to swallow handfuls of tabs at a time. The end of it came when we got back to England.
“I took 10 tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour.
“In the end the horse turned round and told me to f*** off. That was it for me.”
Ozzy’s former bandmate and Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has also opened up on the group’s psychedelic experiences.
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Geezer told Classic Rock magazine the band first experimented with psychedelics during a trip to California in 1972, when they were recording their fourth album, the appropriately titled Vol.4.
He said: “We got to California, and we were at this chick’s place, this massive beach house. And she gives us this stuff, psilocybin.
“I’d never heard of it, didn’t know it was another name for acid, and just took it – me and Ozzy and these girls.
"Ozzy went for a swim in the ocean – at least he thought he did, but he was still on the beach, flailing away in the sand.”
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Ozzy’s history with drug use has been well-documented, with the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness admitting that he’d been hooked on pretty much every drug under the sun at some point during his career.
At his peak, he claims to have been taking '[everything from] booze, coke, heroin, acid and Quaaludes to glue, cough syrup, Rohypnol, klonopin, Vicodin … on more than a few occasions, I was on all of those at the same time'.
One infamous story alleges that Osbourne was once so strung out that he snorted a line of ants whilst out on tour with Mötley Crüe - although Osbourne's guitarist Jake E Lee claims this didn't actually happen.
Ozzy also claimed to have once given some bats a bag of cocaine as an ‘apology’ for biting the head off one of their kinfolk, and ended up snorting their droppings when his ‘gift’ was rejected.
Despite his hedonistic past though, Ozzy has firmly left that side of himself behind, having been sober for eight years and fully intending to stay that way.
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His LSD admission comes after his return to the stage on 8 August in his hometown of Birmingham for the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, performing the classic Black Sabbath hit ‘Paranoid’ along with former bandmate Tony Iommi.