Ozzy Osbourne Gave Up Taking Acid After Talking To Horse For An Hour

Ozzy Osbourne has shared that he gave up acid after a horse told him to ‘f**k off’, in the 1970s. 

He told the story in an interview with Classic Rock, how an acid trip left him conversing with a horse for an hour. 

The rock legend looked back on recording his former band Black Sabbath's fourth album, Vol. 4, which was released in September 1972.

"We lived together in a house in Los Angeles, rehearsed there, did loads of drugs, and made an album: simple," Osbourne said. "Those were good times."

"At that time in America, people were very fond of lacing your drinks with acid," he added. 

"I didn't care. I used to swallow handfuls of tabs at a time."

Osbourne decided to stop taking acid after an encounter with a horse in England.

"The end of it came when we got back to England," he told Classic Rock. 

"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."

Osbourne, has previously spoken out about his past experimentation with drugs while at the forefront of the 70s heavy metal scene – a habit that eventually proved so problematic that it got him kicked out of the band.

Osbourne opened up about his uphill battle with substance abuse in an interview with Variety.

"I should have been dead 1,000 times," he told Variety after he admitted, "I thought I'd be drinking to the day I die."

Ozzy Osbourne said his addiction impacted his ability to be a present father to his children.

"I didn't give a s—, because I was loaded," he admitted. "It's a very selfish disease. You don't think about it because you're loaded, in an altered state."

His son Jack, 36, also spoke about how substance abuse had affected the family. 

“I was suffering from a lot of depression in my early teens, and I was drinking a lot. And then we did The Osbournes and it gave me a rather large piggy bank, so my parents had less control, and then my mom got sick."

“But in these times, I would dip in and be like, ‘Things aren’t great.’ And then I’d pull back — ‘Oh, things are OK.’ So it was this dance. Eventually, my mom received a phone call from a friend who was like, 'This is bad'.”  [Sharon is a colon cancer survivor]. 

Over the years, his wife Sharon, often worried about him — and whether he would return from his tours alive.

"I was terrified that he was going to get sick in the night, or fall over, hit his head," she told Variety.

Sharon also spoke about the moment she realized she couldn't make her husband stop using drugs and alcohol during a 2016 episode of The Talk.

"It was an incident a few years back when my husband called me up and he said … 'I want you to know that I'm back drinking,' " she recalled. 

"And I just said, 'Hey, do what you've gotta do. Knock yourself out. See you later. Bye.' "

She said it feels ‘very calm in the house’ now that her husband is sober, adding: “It’s great for our whole family. It really is.”