 the real story behind the legend of Cocaine Bear. Cocaine Bear is currently in theaters, bringing with it an onslaught of severed limbs, blood-soaked victims, and gruesome mayhem. Yet that is not exactly how the true narrative of the Cocaine Bear, also known as Pablo Escobar, would be described. The discovery of a dead bear in George's Chattahoochee National Forest in 1985 inspired Jimmy Warden's screenplay for Banks' film. In September 1985, Andrew Thornton, a convicted drug smuggler, died in a parachute accident. The current assumption is that Thornton was traveling in an airplane with 880 pounds of cocaine and believed the federal government was tailing him, so he threw some of the cash out of the plane and parachuted with the rest. His strategy went astray.