Cocaine Bear’s teaser has stoked a lot of anticipation, and audiences are getting ready to go nuts. One thing that has people talking is that the tale is inspired by real events.
You can get the gist of this by watching the trailer:
“An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converge in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine,” the insane synopsis reads.
The new comic horror film from filmmaker Elizabeth Banks is inspired by a true story of a drug-smuggling conspiracy gone bad, proving that reality is frequently stranger than fiction. Andrew Thornton, a veteran narcotics officer and attorney who grew to lead a narcotics trafficking operation in Kentucky known as “The Company,” was at the center of the arrest.
A movie could be made only on one angle of the subject, but in 1985 things took an even more ridiculous turn. Thornton was on his way to Georgia from Colombia when he jumped out of an unmanned airplane and dropped a load of Class A cocaine near Blairsville.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigations believes he may have struck his head on the plane’s tail and been unable to open his parachute before falling to the earth, leading to his eventual discovery in the driveway of a Knoxville residence.
When police arrived, they saw that Thornton was protected from gunfire by his bulletproof vest and was wearing a pair of Gucci loafers. In addition to the firearms, knives, cash, and night vision goggles, he also carried a duffel bag with millions of dollars’ of cocaine.
Further duffel bags with illegal substances would be included in this tale. The now-famous 175-pound black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest three months after the incident, when authorities followed the flightpath of Thornton’s jet.
After discovering many empty packages around the animal, they determined that it had consumed one of 10 duffel bags carrying the illegal substance. It had obviously overdosed after consuming 70 pounds of cocaine.
It sounds like the bear had a genuinely horrible and rather rapid death, in contrast to the picture, in which the bear goes on a violent rampage.
“Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.” The medical examiner who performed an autopsy on the bear said.
You may be interesting to learn that the story of the bear, now affectionately known as “Pablo Eskobear,” does not stop here; the bear was eventually stuffed and is on display at the Kentucky For Kentucky shop in Lexington. A film adaptation of this epic tale is long overdue, and we won’t have to wait too much longer to see the unsubtly named Cocaine Bear.
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