What would happen if a bear swallowed a brick of cocaine? Would they talk at you for hours? Rail lines in the forest while other animals looked on, disgusted? It’s a question many of us never contemplated until the trailer for Cocaine Bear dropped on Thursday and forced us to consider that very issue. Based on the real life story of a 175lb black bear who ravaged a duffel bag of abandoned cocaine in 1985, the film – out in cinemas February 2023 – depicts the animal on a drug-fuelled rampage.
Directed and produced by Hunger Games actor Elizabeth Banks, the two-minute trailer begins with ambulance workers entering a spooky wooden lodge. Horror registers on their face as they take in the scene before them: A dead body blocking the door and a house turned upside down with blood staining the walls. “Oh Jesus… what is that…” one says. Out of the shadows, a gigantic bear emerges with blood dripping down its face.
This, my friends, is Cocaine Bear.
The trailer for the film – also starring Keri Russell and Ray Liotta in his final screen role (RIP) – shows the bear hunting people down and murdering them as the monster of addiction takes hold. All this mammal wants, it seems, is more gak.
But spare a minute for the bear. Surely it can’t be good for these ursine creatures to ingest that much blow? In reality, said bear died of brain haemorrhaging and failure of the kidney, heart and lungs, a medical examiner determined – a tragic outcome the film trailer avoids mentioning. But is that necessarily the fate for all bears who do blow? To find out, we asked Dr Romain Pizzi, the senior vice president of the British Veterinary Zoological Society and a man who’s worked for years with several species of bears.
VICE: What did you think of the Cocaine Bear trailer?
Dr Romain Pizzi: Nearly all the behaviour you can see in it is completely unrealistic. Even if you were to get a bear that was on cocaine, it's unlikely it would react like that. When they say it's based on a true story, I think that's very disingenuous. It's like saying, someone fell off the roof and died and then you make a movie about Spider-Man and say it’s based on a true story.
But the analogy is Jaws. Jaws caused so much harm to sharks for decades, because people thought of them as horrible maniac killers. And obviously, it was a blockbuster. This is the exact same sort of thing. The reality is bears are scared of humans.
Would a bear even get addicted to cocaine, as the film seems to suggest?
The problem is we don’t know what the scent of the cocaine is or what attracted the bear to it. It’s not like the bear had an innate desire to do that, obviously. It’s highly unlikely that, never having encountered the drug before, it would suddenly be massively attracted to an addictive drug. Also, even if it had a small amount, it's not going to suddenly crave that temptation and form an addiction that quickly. So the whole premise that I can see from that is fundamentally wrong.
Would a bear get aggressive if it ate loads of cocaine?
When we need to test bears, we use chemicals – some of them are called dissociative anaesthetic. Some of them are very strong opioids, and the closest analogy we have is fentanyl, which is about 1,000 times the strength of morphine. If you manage to get a bear with a partial dose so it's not fully anaesthetised, they change to be more scared, if anything.
There's lots and lots of studies that have shown that bears are quite fearful of people generally, but they become accustomed to people in North America within close proximity. But in Scandinavia, they've done lots of long term studies with bears, where they will go and measure their cortisol levels – a measure of stress – and the closer they live in proximity to people, the higher the general stress and fear.
Could it attack people?
Now, bears will attack people, but it's generally not going to be anything like the movie. It would be if it felt fear, if there's a mother and cubs and it was cornered or separated. The trailer calls it an apex predator, but that’s not even true. Most of their diet is not actually animal-based – they'll eat everything from moths to berries to salmon.
Noted. Thanks, Dr Pizzi!