Peacock is not only debuting the campy film “Cocaine Bear” on its streaming service starting Friday, but it’s also releasing a companion 52-minute documentary at the same time based on the real-life story of what actually happened that led to the movie in the first place.
In December 1985, a hunter found a dead bear next to an empty duffel bag in the north Georgia mountains. Authorities surmised that the bear died after consuming cocaine tied to Kentucky drug smuggler Drew Thornton, who inexplicably dumped duffel bags of cocaine out of an airplane.
Thornton himself parachuted out of the plane with 77 pounds of cocaine attached to him but it didn’t work out and he died as well, landing in a man’s driveway in Knoxville.
In the re-imagining in the movie, which generated $64 million in domestic box office gross earlier this year, the bear kills and injures multiple people. That never happened in real life.
The documentary focuses primarily on Thornton, who grew up wealthy in Lexington, Kentucky.
After a stint in the military, he became a police officer in the narcotics squad. There, he began smuggling pot on the side. He eventually quit the police and became a full-time smuggler piloting thousands of pounds of marijuana stateside from Colombia in South America.
Thornton’s criminal cohorts eventually got caught and he himself ended up in prison for a modest five months. In the 1980s, he switched to cocaine, which was more profitable. But his dangerous criminal lifestyle led to his death in 1985.
Talking heads in the doc include FBI agent Jim Huggins, Georgia Bureau of Investigations agent Fran Wiley, true crime podcaster Charles Stites, Kentucky historian Ron Bryant, reporter Michael York, who covered the story at the time, and Knox County detective Jimmy “JJ” Jones, who was at the scene in Knoxville where Thornton’s dead body was found.
Why Thornton dumped so much of his cocaine out of the plane, why he jumped out of the plane and why his parachute failed are not 100% known, but the experts throw out plenty of theories.
The dead Georgia bear’s life story is harder to chronicle, but the doc does show a bear in taxidermy form in a Kentucky museum, which claims it is the cocaine bear. (The GBI agent is skeptical.)
Also as an amusing side note, the GBI agent mentioned cows in Georgia who consumed cocaine discovered in 1982 though that incident was never tied to Thornton.
IF YOU WATCH
“Cocaine Bear: The True Story,” available April 14 for Peacock subscribers
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