the bizarre The white powder bear hit theaters this Thursday (30th) with a proposal that would be absurd if it weren’t real: to tell the story of a bear who swallowed kilos of cocaine thrown out of a plane by a trafficker. It’s so surreal it sounds impossible, but it actually happened.
And that is the great charm of Elizabeth Banks’ feature film. For all the exaggeration and wacky tone the film carries, it’s an adaptation of what really happened. A very loose adaptation, true, but it’s still a story based on true events.
The sad story of Pablo Eskobear
The case that inspired The white powder bear It happened in the United States in 1985 when drug dealer Andrew Thornton, an exmilitary man transporting a shipment of cocaine from Colombia, dumped 40 boxes of drugs in a forested region of Georgia state.
This is even shown in the film, which reveals that the plan was to drop the cargo into this mountainous area from the top of a plane for other members of the gang to pick it up. In reality, he was taking those shots and even attempting to jump with dozens of pounds of the drug on his body and having trouble deploying the parachute. So he fell like a rock in a garage.
The point is that after dropping dead on someone’s house, police began investigating the area looking for the remaining narcotics Thornton likely planted in the area.
Many kilometers away, local authorities found a giant black bear dead, weighing 175 kg. And what attracted attention was that it appeared uninjured, although it was bleeding from body orifices such as its eyes, nose and mouth.
Then they put the dots together and found that the animal had found the packages. What’s more, he snorted and even ate a good amount of the drug. According to a later investigation, the beast’s stomach was full of cocaine and it is estimated that he ingested around 40 kilos of the powder.
This is where reality differs from fiction. In The white powder bear, the bear smells massive doses of the narcotic and gets angry turning him into the killing machine the trailers showcased and spawning some funny scenes that play on the fact that he’s high. The reality, on the other hand, was a little harsher and more boring: in the face of so many drugs, the bear overdosed and died.
Experts estimate that due to the conditions in which it was found, the animal did not last more than a few hours before suffering the effects on its organism. According to the coroner in charge of the autopsy, he had a cerebral hemorrhage and hyperthermia, respiratory, cardiac and renal failure. In layman’s terms, the bear imploded.
From victim to attraction in the mall
while the animal The white powder bear leaves a huge trail of death and mutilation along the way In search of more cocaine, the animal that actually swallowed the drug had a fate as picturesque as even after death.
Since this is such a unique and quirky case, someone came up with the idea of turning the animal into an attraction. So he was stuffed and named Pablo Eskobear in a play about the drug dealer Pablo Escobar and Bear in English. As if that wasn’t enough, it was placed as part of a mall’s decoration.