The Actual Historical past of Cocaine Bear: A True Story of Medication, Wildlife, and… Taxidermy?

From right here, the story of the Cocaine Bear’s last days is thought solely to squirrels, river otters, and presumably Bigfoot. People don’t re-enter the image till December when the physique of a black bear is found by Georgian federal officers making an attempt to reconstruct the trail of Thornton’s final drug run. With the useless bear is a lot of cocaine. Like, a three-part Very Particular Episode of Miami Vice quantity: practically 90 lbs of white powder, at a road worth of $20 million. What wasn’t current on the scene have been any human victims. Sorry, film followers. The one dwelling factor the Cocaine Bear took out in his drug-fueled frenzy was himself.

The grownup bear’s age isn’t sure, although at 175 kilos, he was both nonetheless fairly younger, dealing with a lean season, or he had found the burden suppressant skill of all that nostril sweet he’d been chomping down. The feds despatched the bear to a medical expert as a part of their legal investigation. The examiner’s findings have been… undoubtedly one thing. For animal lovers, that is the place the reality will get grim.

In response to the Cocaine Bear’s official merch web site, the poor creature’s abdomen was packed stuffed with cocaine when he died. The medical expert went on to assert that virtually each horrorshow end result of a drug overdose had occurred, quote, “Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, coronary heart failure, stroke. You identify it, that bear had it.”

Although it sounds extra just like the soon-to-be-legendary bear was Keith Richards’ private portrait within the attic, it will get far worse for the large fella than the upcoming film posits. The medical expert, impressed with the bear’s exterior situation, packed him off to a taxidermist pal. The resultant stuffed bear was then placed on show on the Chattanooga River Nationwide Recreation Space, with out its infamy spelled out for guests. It will definitely received misplaced in a storage room shuffle through the early ‘90s, after which some artifacts ended up in an area pawn store. Together with the bear.

The Cocaine Bear’s subsequent leg of his journey includes nation music legend Waylon Jennings, and if he doesn’t have a tune on the film soundtrack, director Elizabeth Banks missed a trick. Jennings preferred accumulating Americana curios, and, allegedly, he was buddies with a former Thornton affiliate and Vegas gadfly named Ron Thompson. The bear, now certainly one of historical past’s weirdest white elephant items, stayed in Thompson’s mansion till an property sale in 2009 landed our protagonist in a Chinese language drugs store, the place it could grimace mildly at vacationers searching for ginseng and acupuncture therapies.