You can’t help someone unless they’re willing and ready to help themselves, and that’s the gospel. It rings true of everything, but it especially rings true when it comes to addiction. There has to be a moment of change for the person suffering, a moment of realisation when they decide they want to get better. Any attempts before that will probably be futile, like when Ozzy Osbourne was checked into the Betty Ford Clinic.
The BFC is famous in the world of music and entertainment. It was started by the first lady, Betty Ford, who herself had bravely been open about her struggles with substance abuse and mental illness due to the stress of her life.
The rehab has now been open since 1982 and has helped the likes of Drew Barrymore, Billy Joel, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Cash, and many more esteemed names. Stevie Nicks was a notable resident for a while and genuinely stakes her life and health on the place, stating, “As far as I’m concerned, Betty Ford DID save my life”. However, the key fact in her case is that Nicks put herself in the car, drove there and checked in. She wanted to get better or had at least realised that she needed to, that it was a matter of life or death.
Ozzy Osbourne, one of music’s most famous wild cards, had not realised that. Or, if he had, he didn’t really care. He and substance abuse went hand in hand from the start. “I get high, I get fucked up… what the hell’s wrong with getting fucked up? There must be something wrong with the system if so many people have to get fucked up,” he said in 1978. It was the type of addiction that would have utterly ripped the band apart if it wasn’t for his almost mythical ability to seemingly survive anything and do copious amounts of whatever. Guitarist Zakk Wylde once said Osbourne had a “very special kind of fortitude that’s bigger than King Kong and Godzilla combined,” adding, “Seriously, he’s hard as nails, man!”
But just because you can hack it on a night out doesn’t mean it’s not doing damage, and it was. It eventually began causing personal damage among the band members, career damage as there were a number of scandals surrounding his behaviour, and, inevitably, there was the damage to his health that everyone around him was growing increasingly concerned about.
The problem is that Osbourne loved drugs, and while that was still the case, any attempt to help him would fail, like in 1986, when his wife, Sharon, dropped him off at the BFC.
Sharply dressed, coming from some event or some shoot or the like, the rocker walked into the building, walked up to the desk where patients usually came and begged for help to be checked in, and he said, “Direct me to the cocktail bar”.
“They all looked at me as if I’d landed from Mars,” he told Howard Stern decades later, “That’s the only way she could get me in the goddamn place,” explaining how his wife has tricked him into thinking he was going there to simply learn how to handle his booze like a gentleman.
By now, Osbourne is sober, but it’s never been an easy sobriety. As recently as 2021, he shared interviews about the difficulty of it and the various relapses he’s had. “The bottom line is if you want to do anything in this world, you’ve got to really want it,” he said, learning the same tough lesson we started with; it just took him a long time to get there.
