Unlike the movie, the real-life cocaine bear didn't go on a coke-fueled rampage, but it did consume a fatal amount of cocaine left in the woods by smugglers
But the story of the real cocaine bear began decades earlier—and highlights the effects of humans’ recklessness when it comes to the wildlife around them.The real story begins with a man named Andrew Carter Thornton II. Born in 1944, he was the son of a prominent Kentucky horse breeder and became an expert paratrooper for the U.S. Army, even earning a Purple Heart when the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965.
Thornton left the Army that same year and returned to Kentucky, where he joined the Lexington police department’s narcotics squad. But Thornton soon became more interested in selling drugs than cracking down on them. As a former colleague investigative reporter Sally Denton years later, Thornton was “‘an 007 paramilitary type personality...an adventurer driven by adrenaline rushes’ who got bored being a cop.” He eventually resigned from the police and became an attorney.
Thornton’s desire for excitement led him further and further into his side career in narcotics trafficking. In 1981, he was indicted along with 24 others for piloting a plane that smuggled marijuana from South America into Lexington, Kentucky; after months as a fugitive and a massive manhunt, heThen, in September 1985, Thornton took to the skies for what would be hisdrug smuggling mission, jumping out of a plane over Knoxville, Tennessee, with a duffel bag containing $15 million in cocaine.
But though Thornton’s life was over, his legacy was not. Two months after the smuggler’s death, a Georgia huntera dead bear surrounded by the remains of a duffel bag investigators would later deem to be Thornton’s. A medical examiner concluded the 200-pound bear had died of acute cocaine intoxication after ingesting about three to four grams of cocaine.
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