A movie was based on the drug binge that occurred nearly 40 years after a 175-pound black bear found and consumed cocaine in a Georgia woodland.
On Wednesday, a trailer for the upcoming film “Cocaine Bear” was made public. Despite the title’s apparent play on words, the movie is actually about a cocaine-addled bear.
The trailer’s depiction of the horrific rampage that follows the bear’s cocaine binge is fiction, but the tale of the high bear is definitely real. The Elizabeth Banks-directed film, which is scheduled for release on February 24th, is expected to add to its mystique.
Ray Liotta, who passed away in May, is shown in “Cocaine Bear” with Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and another final film role. It shows the victims left behind by the bear’s drug-induced path of dread.
The actual narrative is less graphic.
As you might expect, it all started in the 1980s. According to a three-sentence report from United Press International published in The New York Times in December 1985, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that a 175-pound black bear had “died of an overdose of cocaine after discovering a batch of the drug.”
“The cocaine was apparently dropped from a plane piloted by Andrew Thornton, a convicted drug smuggler who died Sept. 11 in Knoxville, Tenn., because he was carrying too heavy a load while parachuting,” U.P.I. reported. “The bureau said the bear was found Friday in northern Georgia among 40 opened plastic containers with traces of cocaine.”
Check it out for yourself:
