What happens when you take 75 pounds of cocaine and an American black bear in the wilderness? You get the one and only Pablo Escobear, or currently known as Cocaine bear! In this article, I will inform you of the true story that is now being turned into a movie and catching everyone’s eye. 

The story begins in 1985 when former American narcotics and Kentucky-based drug smuggler Andrew C. Thornton II was trafficking cocaine from Columbia to the United States. After his drop in Blairsville, Georgia he took off in an autopilot airplane. On route, him and another accomplice had dropped a load of 40 plastic containers of cocaine off somewhere in the wilderness. Thornton and his accomplice had left the plane afterwards but Thornton would die because his parachute failed to open after jumping out.

According to the FBI, the reason why they had dumped that much off and left was because the amount was too much for their airplane to handle. In December of the same year, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported finding a body of a black bear in the woods that had overdosed on 75 pounds (34 kilograms) of cocaine. The chief medical examiner, Dr. Kenneth Alonso, stated that “its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine.” They did not want to waste the body so they had it taxidermied and now it can be found in the Lexington mall in Kentucky. Now why is this one bear becoming so popular once again?  

In March of 2021 a trailer for a movie called Cocaine Bear was released. The story followed the premise of a drug deal gone wrong and a bear ended up taking a huge majority of it and went on a drug fueled rampage through the mountains of Tennessee. Now this year it will be finally released and due to the weird nature of this film it has gained a fandom out of this. I will see this movie and the differences between real life and fiction.