What Happened To The Bear Who Ate 34kg Of Cocaine?
Hint: It wasn't the best bender
G’day,
I got to watch a movie on a plane the other day, lucky me! I thought it was just a stupid made-up Hollywood film but it was, in fact, based on a true event. It was called Cocaine Bear.
In the film, a drug smuggler drops a heap of packages of coke into a forest and then accidentally crashes the plane (he seemed like he was quite high at the time). Down below in the forest, a bear finds one of the packages, eats it, gets high, and goes on a killing and coke-eating spree. The film sounds gruesome and it was but it was actually hilarious. And it was set in the 1980s so it was so much fun to watch. Lots of jumpsuits and smoking.
I was shocked to read that, apart from the killing of the innocent hikers, a bear did actually find cocaine in the bush one day and ate it.
The most interesting part about this true story was that the drug smuggler was, in fact, an ex-narcotics officer who turned bad and started running drugs into the USA in planes.
One day, he was being tailed by the FBI in a plane with hundreds of kilos of coke so he started chucking it out the door of the plane. He then tried to parachute out but he hit his head on the tail so his parachute didn’t open and he plummeted to his death. He was found in someone’s driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee, wearing night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, Gucci loafers, with a few guns and knives and $4500 in cash. I hope that’s how I go out.
About four months later, they found the bear dead in the forest. According to an autopsy, the bear had ingested around 34 kilograms of the white stuff. A medical examiner said: “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that.” And he didn’t even go out on an epic high; instead, sadly, he probably died in pain, of shock, and with his body shutting down. “Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke — you name it, that bear had it.”
In another “Only in America” twist, the bear was stuffed and donated to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Centre before ending up in a Nashville pawnshop. Here, the country singer Waylon Jennings gifted it to a friend in Las Vegas. Then, when that friend died, another man bought it at an estate auction for $200.
When he died in 2012, a “fun mall” in Kentucky stepped in and bought it and now you can pose for photos with the actual bear. There’s a whole warehouse full of merch on offer — from a Cocaine Bear ‘blow’ snowglobe or Cocaine Bear soap, to ‘I partied with Cocaine Bear’ beer can coolers.
The director of Cocaine Bear made this film because she thought, after the way the bear died, she wanted it to get revenge on humans. It’s a very satisfying watch.
