Report: OZZY OSBOURNE Claims Doctor Overprescribed Medication

A Beverly Hills physician who prescribed a host of powerful medications to Ozzy Osbourne, causing the star of the hit reality series "The Osbournes" to be in a perpetual stupor, was under investigation for overprescribing drugs to other celebrity patients while he was treating Osbourne, according to a report published in the Los Angeles Times.

Prescription records show that Dr. David A. Kipper had Osbourne on an array of potent drugs — opiates, tranquilizers, amphetamines, antidepressants, even an antipsychotic, according to the report

The singer said he swallowed as many as 42 pills a day.

"I was wiped out on pills," said Osbourne, who fired Kipper in September, more than a year after becoming his patient. "I couldn't talk. I couldn't walk. I could barely stand up. I was lumbering about like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It got to the point where I was scared to close my eyes at night — afraid I might not wake up."

The state medical board last week moved to revoke Kipper's license, accusing him of gross negligence in his treatment of other patients.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, medical director of the chemical dependency program at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, said the regimen was especially risky for someone like Osbourne.

"This was an extreme amount of medication for a doctor to prescribe to a patient with an addiction history," Pinsky said. "On my chemical unit, patients like this are not allowed to be exposed to any of these kinds of addictive drugs."

Kipper charged the couple $650,000 for his services from June 2002 until they fired him three months ago, records show. The medications he prescribed cost them an additional $58,000.

In August, Osbourne was invited to sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field in Chicago. He slurred his way through the song, mangling the familiar lyrics.

The scene was replayed repeatedly on national TV.

"Ozzy was overmedicated," Sharon Osbourne said. "He couldn't speak. He couldn't walk. He was falling over. Ozzy would call Kipper and tell him how bad he was feeling, and Kipper would say: 'Take five more of those and 10 more of these.' It was insane."

After the Wrigley Field fiasco, Sharon said, she had had enough. She said she called Kipper and told him to stay away from her husband.

Then, on the advice of a friend, she scheduled an appointment for Ozzy with Dr. Allan H. Ropper, chief of neurology at Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston.

Osbourne flew to Boston in September and met with Ropper.

"He was absolutely flabbergasted about the kinds and amounts of medication that I was on," Ozzy said. "He asked me, 'Where are you getting all these pills from?' Then he just threw everything in the trash."

Osbourne said the doctor weaned him off Kipper's medications and wrote him prescriptions for three drugs, primarily to treat what the singer described as a hereditary tremor. Read more (free registration required).