The 2023 film ‘Cocaine Bear’ may have a wild plot, but it was actually inspired by real events.
After the release of Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear, the film quickly entered the top 10. The story follows a bear that goes on a rampage after ingesting a massive amount of cocaine. The animal became lost deep in the forests of Georgia following the crash of a drug-smuggling plane.
But what really happened?
If it seems like the story of Cocaine Bear sprang from the director’s imagination, that’s not the case at all. The film was inspired by a true incident that took place in 1985. Andrew Carter Thornton II, who led a major cocaine trafficking operation, used planes to smuggle drugs, landing them in rural areas where his accomplices would retrieve the cargo.
On September 11, 1985, things went terribly wrong. Believing that federal agents were onto him, Thornton dropped three 66-pound bags of cocaine, then set the plane to autopilot and jumped with a parachute. However, because of the heavy bags strapped to him, he was unable to deploy his parachute and died in a suburban area of Tennessee.
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Four months after his death, another grim discovery was made: the remains of a 220-pound black bear. The animal had ingested a large amount of the cocaine that Thornton had thrown from the plane. The bear died from a combination of brain hemorrhage, hyperthermia, respiratory failure, and heart failure. Its stomach was found to be full of cocaine — more than 33 pounds of the drug.
