Overview
- Channel 4 airs Cocaine Bear at 9:30 p.m. tonight, prompting renewed summaries of the real events behind the movie.
- The 1985 incident followed Andrew Thornton’s botched airdrop, after which officers found 40 opened containers and a dead black bear in Chattahoochee National Forest.
- A medical examiner said the animal died from multi-system failures consistent with cocaine poisoning after reportedly ingesting roughly 90 pounds of the drug.
- Investigators later recovered additional duffel bags across Georgia and Tennessee and assessed that Thornton’s network had smuggled about 880 pounds of cocaine into the U.S.
- The bear was taxidermied, nicknamed Pablo EskoBear, and remains on display at the Kentucky Fun Mall after being traced by the local group Kentucky for Kentucky.