The REAL Story Behind Waylon Jennings and the Cocaine Bear

Editor’s Note: This topic was first explored in a May 2021 episode of Country History X. Subsequently, new revelations about the Cocaine Bear and Waylon’s involvement have come to light. Due to continued misreporting on the matter, this new Country History X episode was composed to help address misconceptions.

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Listen to this story on the Country History X podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all other major podcast networks.

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Maybe you’ve heard the tale of the “Bluegrass Conspiracy” and the Cocaine Bear, or maybe you haven’t. The story is so complex that it’s hard to give a proper summation of. But long story short, a crooked cop from blue blood Kentucky society named Andrew Thornton turned into a drug smuggling kingpen and ended up parachuting to his death in 1985 when he loaded down a private plane with too much cocaine.

Some of the precious cargo from that fateful trip also ended up getting dumped into a Georgia forest, where a black bear happened upon it, and reportedly consumed enough of the white powder to sucumb to overdose. An author by the name of Sally Denton wrote a book called The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs & Murder about the whole ordeal, and then on February 24th, 2023, Universal Pictures released a heavily fictionalized account of a bear under the influence of cocaine rampaging through the wilderness and terrorizing campers appropriately titled Cocaine Bear, inspired in part by the Andrew Thornton story.

Meanwhile, in Lexington, Kentucky at a place called the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall on Bryan Ave., there is a taxademied black bear on display that the owners claim is the true “Cocaine Bear” from both The Bluegrass Conspiracy book about Andrew Thornton, as well as the Cocaine Bear movie. Universal Pictures actually had to license the name “Cocaine Bear” from Kentucky for Kentucky for the film. Along with a placard that claims it’s the real Cocaine Bear, on August 19th, 2015, Kentucky for Kentucky published a very detailed story on their website about how they both obtained the Cocaine Bear, and verified its authenticity.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with country music, aside from the fact that the original telling of the demise of Kentucky cocaine kingpin Andrew Thornton what nicknamed “The Bluegrass Conspiracy” simply because much of it happened in The Bluegrass State. In the long and sordid story by Kentucky for Kentucky about how they obtained the Cocaine Bear, they also implicated country music Outlaw legend Waylon Jennings as being an owner of the bear at one point.

According to Kentucky for Kentucky, after the fatal overdose, the Cocaine Bear ended up in the visitor’s center of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Georgia, where it remained for a few years, though nobody knew it was in fact the notorious Pablo Escobear since no such allusions or descriptions were included with the visitor’s center display. It was just portrayed as another wildlife piece.

Then as the story goes, in the early 90’s, an impending forest fire forced the park rangers of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area to evacuate all the buildings, and put many of the visitor center’s displays and artifacts into a storage facility in the nearby town of Dalton, Georgia, including Native American artifacts, and the Cocaine Bear.

The story then goes that when park rangers returned to the storage facility about a month later, all of the visitor center’s artifacts, including the Cocaine Bear, were gone, and presumably stolen. Then, the Native American artifacts that were in the visitor’s center allegedly turned up some 160 miles away in a pawn shop in Nashville, Tennessee, but the Cocaine Bear was nowhere to be found.

The story from Kentucky for Kentucky continues that the pawn shop owner figured out that the taxadermied animal was actually the Cocaine Bear, reached out to Waylon Jennings personally to sell it to him, with Waylon ultimately purchasing it, and eventually passing it along to Las Vegas socialite and noted cocaine user Ron Thompson.

Ron Thompson kept possession of the bear until his death in 2009, according to the Kentucky for Kentucky account. When he died and his estate was auctioned off, the bear was bought by a Chinese immigrant living in Reno for $200 dollars who ended up using it as a display piece in his traditional Chinese medicine shop. When the medicine shop owner died in 2012, the Cocaine Bear went back into storage, with the famous story behind stuffed animal forgotten until Kentucky for Kentucky tracked it down directly.

The reason the story seemed so plausible is because Waylon Jennings was indeed a collector of rare and interesting items over the years. At one point, the old location of the Country Music Wax Museum on Music Row in Nashville did a special exhibition of these items. Waylon was also a notorious cocaine user in his heyday, including the famous drug bust in 1977 when DEA agents busted into a recording session to arrest Waylon for cocaine possession, later chronicled in the hit song, “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.”

But on the night of March 31st, 1984, Waylon Jennings did all of the cocaine he could handle, and then left the rest he had in his possession—which was about twenty thousand dollars worth—on his bus parked outside a remote cabin in the Arizona desert, and started the detox process, assisted solely by his wife Jessi Colter, and a doctor who would come by every once in a while to give him vitamin shots.

It’s important to note that Waylon Jennings kicked cocaine in 1984, but the Bluegrass Conspiracy and the Cocaine Bear incident didn’t happen until 1985 and after, so by the time the Cocaine Bear supposedly came into Waylon’s possession, he’d sworn off the white powder.

Saving Country Music featured the story of the Cocaine Bear and its relationship to Waylon Jennings in a 2021 episode of Country History X as the Cocaine Bear motion picture was in development. The primary source for both the chain of custody for the taxedermied bear itself and Waylon’s possession of it was the account from the Lexington-based business Kentucky For Kentucky.

The details from that written account had made it into The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and countless other news outlets and periodicals all around the United States and world. When the Cocaine Bear film was released in early 2023, the story spread like wildfire in the press, and folks made their way to the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall to see the “real” Cocaine Bear.

Also appreciate that the Cocaine Bear wasn’t just a random display in the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. There is an entire merch line of T-shirts, sweaters, coffee mugs, snow globes, and other Cocaine Bear souvenirs that accompany the taxidermied black bear. It’s promoted as a primary attraction to draw people to the self-described Fun Mall.

But with the fevered interest in the Cocaine Bear from the film also came some scrutiny. Before releasing the Country History X episode on the Cocaine Bear, Saving Country Music had reached out to Kentucky For Kentucky to attempt to verify the information in the original origin story published in 2015. Representatives at the retail shop swore it was true. An attempt was also made to acquire the police records about the stolen items from the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area visitor’s center that ended up at the pawn shop in Nashville. That came up short, but would have been difficult to obtain without digging through records for days, if they even existed at this point.

As fantastic as the origin story for the Cocaine Bear seemed, it all felt plausible and believable when you also considered it beside the verified details of Andrew Thornton and The Bluegrass Conspiracy book. After all, there had actually been a “Cocaine Bear,” so it seemed believable that someone would end up in possession of it. And so everyone ran with Kentucky for Kentucky’s Cocaine Bear account.

Then on February 23rd, 2023 during the release of the Cocaine Bear movie, Shooter Jennings—the son of Waylon Jennings—took to social media to say, “Endless reporters have wasted our time over and over asking us if Waylon really owned the damn Cocaine Bear. He just plain never did. He never owned a home in Las Vegas either, but somehow ‘trusted sources’ all over continue to spread the fake news. So consider this your f–king fact check…. The movie does look like a great time…”

For the record, none of the claims from Kentucky for Kentucky, Saving Country Music, or the vast majority of the news reports in major news publications on the Cocaine Bear claimed that Waylon Jennings lived in Las Vegas. But the primary reason these “endless reporters” were reaching out to Shooter Jennings for information about the Cocaine Bear is because they wanted to get the story right. They didn’t want to “spread the fake news.” Though it’s completely understandable that all the inquiries to Shooter were a nuisance, this was a symptom of reporters doing their jobs by trying to confirm the source information.

Another one of the reasons that so many reporters reached out to Shooter Jennings to attempt to corroborate or refute the Cocaine Bear story is because leading up to the film release, Kentucky for Kentucky flatly refused to communicate with the outside world about the matter, let alone produce any evidence corroborating their claims that their bear on display was in fact the Cocaine Bear.

Shortly after Saving Country Music posted its Country History X podcast on the matter in May of 2021, both the Kentucky for Kentucky business, and the writer of the Cocaine Bear origin story—a guy named Coleman Larkin—were contacted again, and followed up with numerous times to attempt to obtain authenticating documentation on the Cocaine Bear, and/or Waylon’s possession of it. They never responded.

Simultaneously with Saving Country Music’s inquiries and investigation, a reporter named Natalia Martinez at Channel 3 WAVE in Louisville, KY had been diving deep into the matter as well, including talking to the actual people who were involved in the original investigation into the Cocaine Bear. Though virtually all the news stories on the Cocaine Bear either sourced their information from other media sources in an endless media echo chamber, or from the information published by Kentucky for Kentucky, a WAVE story posted on December 19th, 2022 reported,

“The official cause of death [of the Cocaine Bear] was cocaine ingestion, according to the medical examiner and government reports gathered exclusively by WAVE News. [But] contrary to the story told by Kentucky for Kentucky, the bear’s stomach was not packed with the drug. During the course of our investigation, the medical examiner told WAVE there was no stomach left at all by the time the bear was found.”

“We had bones and a little bit of hide,” the medical examiner told WAVE. “We had bones and used them to give us an idea of the height and weight of what the bear would have been.”

This information directly refuted Kentucky for Kentucky’s characterization of events that read, “The examiner said, the bear’s body remained in good cosmetic shape. Such good shape that he thought it would be a shame to just have it cremated. He contacted a hunting buddy who did taxidermy, had it stuffed and then gifted it to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, where it was displayed in the visitor center behind a plaque without mention of its party animal past.”

Kentucky for Kentucky also claimed, “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral hemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.”

But according to Francis Bishop Wiley who was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation officer who handled the Cocaine Bear case,

“When they took the Cocaine Bear to the crime lab … it ran everybody out of the lab. It smelled so bad. It was so decomposed. It was so rotten … It was sprawled out flat. There wasn’t really much to go on other than it was a flat, deceased corpse of a bear. It could not have been taxidermied. No Pablo Escobear, sorry … It was not a large amount of cocaine. The crime lab report determined it was six grams. Six grams is equivalent to six small packets of Sweet & Low.”

It is true that many kilos of cocaine likely landed in the forest near where the bear was found. But investigators believe that much of the cocaine was stolen due to razor blades and other items also found near the scene. The only way medical examiners determined the bear passed away from a cocaine overdose was bone marrow samples.

As for the bear ending up at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area Visitor’s Center, as one enterprising Saving Country Music internet sleuth pointed out, “The Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area visitor center sounds remote but is actually Atlanta Metro—about 5 miles north of I-285. There were no evacuation-level wildfires anywhere near that area anywhere near that time. That would have been a huge story, except there’s no record of it because it didn’t actually happen, and I’ve talked to people who lived around there their whole life who confirmed that nothing like that ever happened. And also got reliable confirmation that the bear corpse was never actually displayed at the visitor center to begin with.”

Natalia Martinez at Channel 3 WAVE in Louisville also looked into this and confirmed, “The [Georgia] division of Forestry told me they are not allowed to display taxidermied animals. They never would have had it.”

In one final effort to make contact with the bear owner Whit Hiler of Kentucky for Kentucky and the writer for the origin story Coleman Larkin, Saving Country Music went through different channels amid the movie release. On Friday, February 24th, 2023 Coleman Larkin finally responded in an email, “Sorry we’ve been tough to pin down. Lots of media requests as you can imagine. We’re working on an official press kit that will include notarized copies of official documents and other supporting materials that will more firmly establish Cocaine Bear’s provenance.”

Coleman Larkin went on to say that all this information would be made available to Saving Country Music and the rest of the press as soon as they received a “signoff from our legal department and third-party forensic team.”

In other words, after nearly two years of effort by Saving Country Music—let alone Natalia Martinez at WAVE and the scores of other journalists and outlets attempting to get to the bottom of Cocaine Bear’s authenticity and origin story—the writer of the origin story seemed to imply that he had corroborating evidence that the Cocaine Bear and the origin story was actually real. So Saving Country Music waited a little longer, until February 27th, 2023 when another representative of Kentucky for Kentucky named Griffin Van Meter reached out with the official Kentucky for Kentucky statement.

The statement reads:

Based in Lexington, KY. Kentucky For Kentucky LLC is an award-winning creative agency and community-focused business making significant cultural hits since 2011.

Cocaine Bear® is a registered trademark of Kentucky for Kentucky, LLC. We licensed the “Cocaine Bear” name to Universal Pictures.

Without Kentucky for Kentucky’s initial creativity, there is no Cocaine Bear® movie. We are the Big Bang of the Cocaine Bear® Universe, fundamental to its galactic expansion. Fun Fact: The words Cocaine and Bear had never been combined before we did it.

We begot, named, and raised the character Cocaine Bear® beginning in 2015. We’re proud parents! If the media, fans, and the movie are Cocaine Bear®’s apostles and gospellers, we’re Cocaine Bear’s Joseph, Mary, and Holy Spirit. Cocaine Bear® is a beloved character—our collective savior.

We’re pumped that amazing Hollywood creatives recognized our already-on-blast Cocaine Bear® and added rocket fuel to the rocket ship for the world’s collective enjoyment. Like everyone, we love the Cocaine Bear Movie. Cheers!

Our taxidermy bear is 100% Cocaine Bear®.

If you’re questioning whether our taxidermy bear is the exact one that overdosed, you have options regarding our Cocaine Bear:

1. If disbelief is your choice, then we created the most fantastic story ever. A story that carried it through hundreds of articles, podcasts, and memes that grew into a legend that lived in the public’s wildest dreams and fantasies. Our Cocaine Bear® has become a pilgrimage for thousands of worshipers worldwide. A story with a character so alluring, Cocaine Bear was made into a highly anticipated Universal Pictures Film.
   
2. If belief is your adventure, welcome to our beautiful Cocaine Bear® world. We love having you here.
   
3. Or choose both and enjoy this rip-roaring collective cultural moment!

In other words, the actual Cocaine Bear at Kentucky for Kentucky is not the actual Cocaine Bear. It was a hoax the whole time. Saving Country Music posted all this information in a revised story published on February 27th, 2023, and WAVE News in Louisville published an entire 37-minute documentary called Blow: The True Story of Cocaine, a Bear and a Crooked Kentucky Cop on March 10th, 2023.

Nonetheless, hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories citing Kentucky for Kentucky’s account of the Cocaine Bar, including the involvement of Waylon Jennings still remain uncorrected across the internet, the original account still remains on the organization’s website, with Waylon’s name lined out, likely due to legal issues, and the Cocaine Bear remains on display at the business, with thousands of folks being duped each year.

The story of Andrew Thornton that became known as The Bluegrass Conspiracy seemed too fantastic to be true, but was fascinating because it was. But when it comes to the actual Cocaine Bear, the story was complete and utter fiction.