Ozzy Without Harriet: What The Osbournes tells us about drugs.(the anti-drug message of 'The Osbournes' television show)

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 ...