"Prince of Darkness" Ozzy Osbourne Experimented With Every Drug out There

If you ask most people what they picture when you tell them to imagine a rock star, they probably think of someone with long hair, a guitar, some black leather, and most likely a drink in hand or some drugs.

The culture of alcohol and drugs has become a nearly omnipresent entity in the world of rock, and that was no less true in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

This was also true in the rock metal scene, where bands like Black Sabbath dwell. The band's lead vocalist, Ozzy Osbourne, died in 2025 at 76 years old. But before he was a family man and a household name, Ozzy was a rock legend, deeply mired in drug addiction and the culture of rock debauchery. What drugs did Ozzy do in his time? Here's what he's said about it.

In his later years, Ozzy spent many years looking back on the wild life he lived with shock and amazement that somehow he never succumbed to drugs, alcohol, or the health conditions that come from abusing both.

In one 1988 documentary series, The Decline of Western Civilization, Ozzy explained, "It wasn't only Black Sabbath, we all ended up junkies and alcoholics and everything. The drummer ended up in a rehabilitation center. [And] I did, for a while" (excerpts via Shout! Studios).

"In the end, disaster happened. It's inevitable, disaster." He mused, "Drugs, they were OK at the time. We took LSD, we took cocaine, we took vast amounts of marijuana," Ozzy explained, as he tried to pour some orange juice into a cup and missed, spilling liquid on the table.

And in a 1997 interview, Ozzy admitted that it all started with alcohol. "But as the years went by, I started mixing that with pills." He added that he moved then to smoking dope, coke, and "a bit of heroin here and there." He shared that he wasn't a big heroin user, but then he discovered morphine and Demerol, an opiate derivative (excerpts via The Tapes Archive).

In that same 1997 interview, Ozzy mused, "The number of times I OD'd was f--king unbelievable."

He recalled that a doctor once told his wife Sharon not to expect a long life with her husband because, Ozzy quoted the doctor, "his liver's about to fly out of his a--hole."

Ozzy was kicked out of Black Sabbath in 1979 because his addiction issues were out of control. It was clear to the band then, and to Ozzy later in retrospect, that he was out of control and headed for an early grave.

Yet somehow the Prince of Darkness survived until he was 76 years old, a remarkable feat for someone who said in 1997, "With the amount of poison that I put through my f--king body over the years, I should've been dead a thousand times."

According to his family, who released a statement after he died, Ozzy died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. That peaceful end was likely due to the fact that Ozzy got sober in 2014 and seemed to stay that way through the remainder of his life (via USA Today).