IT’S SOMETHING out of a studio executive meeting gone off the rails: A violent bear chase—except with a furious bear high from binging cocaine. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and watch the delightfully entertaining trailer for Cocaine Bear, the new thriller out this weekend in theaters.
Yet unlike Snakes on a Plane and a million other absurd B-movies in its wake, Cocaine Bear is adapted from a real event that took place nearly 40 years ago. The movie also comes with a surprisingly robust Hollywood pedigree: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, the murderous actioner stars pop culture favorites like Keri Russell (The Americans), O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story), and Ray Liotta, in one of the Goodfellas legend’s final completed roles before he died in May 2022. Pitched somewhere between satire and gory spectacle, the film’s narrative follows a coke-fueled bear’s rampage through a Southern city.
The true story that inspired the plot is far less bloody, but fascinating nonetheless. In 1985, a black bear indeed consumed a duffel bag full of cocaine. Here’s a primer on what you need to know about that actual bear (RIP, legit Cocaine Bear) and how the headlines are reflected and distorted in the movie.
What was the true Cocaine Bear story all about?
Cocaine Bear, as the black bear has come to be known, became a mythic figure almost as soon as he appeared in headlines. In 1985, Georgia investigators came upon a 175-pound bear, found next to a duffel bag that had been packed with over 70 pounds of cocaine. The pile of coke had literally dropped from the sky, having been hurled from a drug smuggler’s plane. And what came of it? Well, authorities found the stash ripped up, with dozens of empty packets around said bear, The Independent reports.
What happened to Cocaine Bear?
Well, as with a human ingesting about half their body weight in cocaine, this bear sadly died from an overdose. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced in December of 1985 that it had stumbled across the bear carcass after the animal had apparently huffed the coke in the small mountain town of Blue Ridge, Georgia, according to a United Press International item from the time reported on by The New York Times.
Why was the cocaine there?
The bricks of cocaine devoured by the predatory animal, worth an estimated $15 million, were reportedly dropped out of a plane in 1985 by the drug smuggler Andrew Thornton, the son of wealthy Kentucky horse breeders, in a tale covered by the book The Bluegrass Conspiracy, which seems to be crying out for its own movie adaptation.
Thornton died, too, amid all the mess. The 40-year-old former lawyer and narcotics (!) police officer was on a cocaine run in a Cessna jet coming from Colombia when he jumped out of the plane, “hit his head on the tail of the aircraft,” and failed to open his parachute, killing him, according to the GBI. His corpse was found in a driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee (where the movie takes place). And he was still wearing night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, and (hey, it was the ‘80s) Gucci loafers as part of his drug mule ensemble. He also had $4,500 in cash, two guns, and several knives on his person, per reports. The jet, meanwhile, was only found later after crashing into the mountains of North Carolina, having left a trail of nine duffel bags of cocaine behind it.
Finally, three months after that discovery, Georgia authorities unearthed the fallen bear with the 10th bag of cocaine in the Chattahoochee National Forest bordering Tennessee and Georgia.
Where is Cocaine Bear now?
Funny you should ask, because the bear has had quite the afterlife. He is now stuffed, serving as a tourist attraction in Kentucky for Kentucky, a souvenir shop/quasi-museum in Lexington. (Yes, there’s Cocaine Bear merch.) He has been named Pablo Eskobear after, of course, Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
Kentucky for Kentucky explains that it searched far and wide to add the taxidermied bear to its collection. The company was told by the medical examiner who performed the animal’s necropsy: “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.”
How does the movie shape the Cocaine Bear story?
Aside from getting the Hollywood treatment with actors who absolutely know how to do their thing (including phenomenal character players like Margo Martindale and Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Cocaine Bear imagines what the real Cocaine Bear might have done if he had lived through his cocaine binge and absolutely could not stand the sight of people.
“It was fucked,” one kid says of the bear in question, which is obviously computer graphics-generated. The Banks-directed Cocaine Bear plays loose with the facts of the bear itself, but only in service of giving him another life as a natural killer unlike any other.
Paul Schrodt is a freelance writer and editor who also contributes to Esquire, GQ, Money, The Wall Street Journal, and more.
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