OZZY WITHOUT HARRIET

What The Osbournes Tells Us About Drugs.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, pundits got themselves into a
tizzy over the fact that the U.S. government was giving what amounted to tax
write-offs to television networks for incorporating anti-drug messages into
their programming. The policy died at the hands of the hypocritical media
establishment, which has no problem with the government forcing tobacco
companies to fund multimillion-dollar ad campaigns against their own legal
products, but sees, in the words of the New York Times, "the possibility of
censorship and state-sponsored propaganda" in an anti-drug scene in a drama
about an emergency room.

Such absurdity only highlights the bizarre state of the drug war. Whether
you are for or against drug legalization, it's impossible to dispute that
the public debate is deadlocked. On one side, zero-tolerance drug warriors
like drug czar John P. Walters insist that even marijuana is a "pernicious"
drug closely associated with violence, addiction, and death. On the other
side is a fractious coalition including drug boosters, libertarians,
conservatives, and people who have simply had enough of the drug war's
excesses. It's difficult to see how this impasse can be broken.

One man may have shown us the way: Ozzy Osbourne.

The Osbournes, the reality-TV show about the 53-year-old former lead singer
of the metal band Black Sabbath and his dysfunctional family, is an
unprecedented hit. It receives the highest ratings in MTV's history. More
people watch it than Meet the Press or The Sopranos.

If the policy of tax write-offs for anti-drug messages were still in effect,
MTV would be in the black for the year thanks to The Osbournes. Never in
history has television delivered such a relentlessly compelling anti-drug
message week after week. Ozzy, who spent much of his life on drugs and
alcohol, is a complete and total mess. Without changing a single thing about
himself, he could ease into the crowds of homeless wastoids on any Skid Row
in America and ask passersby for a quarter. He can barely speak. Virtually
every sentence comes out of him as if he'd been shot up with Novocaine.
Indeed, he's so unintelligible that various reviews of the show quote the
same lines of Osbourne's dialogue differently; not even journalists with a
videotape can quite make out what the hell he's saying.

The Osbourne house, a stunningly beautiful manse in Beverly Hills, is a
train wreck. With six dogs, a few cats, and a steady traffic of his kids'
ne'er-do-well friends, Ozzy's life is near-total chaos. An entire episode of
The Osbournes was dedicated to the family's collective inability to
housetrain its dogs: The house is drenched in dog urine, and the Persian
rugs are minefields of canine droppings.

Ozzy and his wife Sharon are only moderately more successful in
housetraining the plump, self-absorbed kids, who, like Dad, can't go a
sentence without cussing (and thus getting bleeped, by MTV). Only two of the
three Osbourne kids, Kelly and Jack, appear on camera. The oldest daughter
is reportedly mortified and is living in the guesthouse for the duration of
the series.

It's not hard to see why. All teenagers are embarrassed about their parents
at some point, but The Osbournes takes it to the limit: When Kelly sees her
mom urinating in a bottle to send a message about drinking in the house, she
screams: "She's pissing in the bottle . . . just like she s**t in Dad's bag
of weed in Hawaii."

To be sure, part of the appeal of the show is how much it exaggerates the
run-of-the-mill conflicts in normal families. Dad tries to lay down the law
and the world ignores him. "I feel like I'm invisible here," he complains
over breakfast, to which his wife replies, "Oh, shut up!" Osbourne loves his
kids un conditionally but finds them incomprehensible. "I love you all," he
tells his son. "I love you more than life itself, but you're all [bleeping]
mad." Ozzy can't even figure out the remote control. "What the [bleep] am I
doing? Can't get this [bleeping] television to work! I'm [bleeping] stuck on
the Weather Channel!" Panicked, he yells, "I press this one button and the
[bleeping] shower starts. Where the [bleep] am I? It's a [bleeping]
nightmare! Nightmare in Beverly Hills!"

Ultimately, the man who famously bit the head off a live bat and urinated on
the Alamo just wants a normal, peaceful life, but he's at a loss about how
to get one. When the neighbors make too much noise, his wife chucks a rotten
ham into their yard and Ozzy follows suit with a log. Afterwards, Mr. and
Mrs. Osbourne wax nostalgic about their former (and favorite) neighbor, Pat
Boone. "He was just the best person ever to live next door to," says the
Missus. "He was such a lovely man."

But the reason the show has such a cartoonish hilarity to it (more than a
few commentators have called it a real-world Simpsons) is that Osbourne is
such a physical and psychological mess. During a recent interview for the
British magazine Loaded, Osbourne was asked about reports that he'd broken
his leg recently but didn't notice. "The truth of the matter is," Osbourne
replied, "I'm f***ing crazy. Seriously. I'm mentally unbalanced. I've done
so many drugs that I've f***ed up my brain somewhere." Asked if he feels
lucky to be alive, Osbourne replied, "Lucky? Well, I ain't f***ing clever,
that's for sure. Everybody says: 'Ozzy, you're a legend.' But behind the
façade is a sad, lonely, wet fart of a person."

This comes through in every episode: His debauchery makes him pathetic,
though endearingly so. "I don't think his fans have any illusions," Doc
Coyle, lead guitarist of the metal band God Forbid, explained to the New
York Times. "Everybody knows his brain is fried." In a sense, MTV is paying
some small penance for the damage it has done to the culture. For years the
network glorified the rocker lifestyle without paying much heed to its
consequences. For example, Madonna's sluttiness was celebrated as if there
were no downside to it. While the lady has the financial resources to
compensate for her lifestyle (she brags, for instance, that she's never
changed her children's diapers), no amount of money can unscramble your
brain. Ozzy may be a sympathetic figure, but even a would-be rock star would
hesitate to be in his shoes.

But while Ozzy is a useful cautionary tale against drug abuse, the success
of The Osbournes should also teach a thing or two to the drug warriors.
Drugs, like it or not, are part of the culture; law enforcement alone is
inadequate to either their regulation or their eradication. Yes, cigarette
smoking is on the wane, in part because of some draconian measures taken by
an overzealous government. But smoking's real defeat has come at the hands
of a cultural transformation. Similarly, laughing at, and hence ridiculing,
drug use is far more useful than one more Eliot Ness lecture about, say, the
connection of pot to the war on terrorism.

The same lesson was on view in last summer's surprise hit song, "Because I
Got High," by a fellow named Afroman. The whole song was a hilarious send-up
of pot-heads: "I was gonna go to court before I got high, I was gonna pay my
child support but then I got high, they took my whole paycheck and I know
why -- 'cause I got high, 'cause I got high, 'cause I got high. . . . I
messed up my entire life because I got high, I lost my kids and wife because
I got high, now I'm sleeping on the sidewalk and I know why -- 'cause I got
high, 'cause I got high."

Unfortunately, some folks who think drugs are never a laughing matter didn't
think the song was so funny. When MTV initially refused to show the song's
video, because it depicted people smoking marijuana, The Weekly Standard --
a zealous supporter of John Walters -- noted in an earnest finger-wag: "It's
a pity that the most humorous pop song in recent years is about getting
high, but [we are] pleased to find MTV for once on the right side of the
culture war."

Actually, it was great news that the most humorous pop song in recent memory
was about how stupid it is to get high, or at least too high. Similarly,
it's even better news that the most popular show in MTV history makes fun of
drug use and, finally, puts MTV on the right side of the culture war.

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