We don’t go to the movies very often. I’m not exactly sure why. When I do watch a movie, I enjoy it. Part of it, I suppose, is that the movie business has changed a lot since the Covid-19 pandemic. Fewer people watch movies in theaters. Many families have access to a lot of movies online. Smart televisions make it easy to access movies through streaming services. I have a large computer monitor in our front room and we have streamed movies on occasion and watched them. I think it is mostly the result of habit. When we were working we were busy and when we had downtime, we enjoyed traveling, reading, walking, canoeing, and a lot of other activities. Watching movies never became a priority for our time. Now that we have time, it doesn’t occur to us to watch a movie.

Here is a movie that I do NOT want to watch: Cocaine Bear.

I’m not much for horror films. I don’t understand why being scared by movie storytelling is entertaining. I wouldn’t pay money to have the high volume surround sound of a theatre assault my hearing while watching multiple fatalities on the screen. But there are other people who do watch such movies. I guess the excitement of facing danger while not really being at risk appeals.

The rough plot of the movie Cocaine Bear is that a drug smuggler drops a shipment of cocaine from an airplane over the forest in Georgia. He attempts to bail from the plane, but is killed and his body lands in Tennessee. Meanwhile across the border in Georgia a bear eats some of the cocaine and become highly aggressive. Hikers get attacked. People find some of the cocaine, the bear seeks more cocaine and attacks the people. The bear attacks more people, gets more cocaine, becomes more aggressive.

OK I haven’t watched the movie. I don’t really know how it goes. Watching a bear, even a pretend bear in a movie, dismember people just isn’t my idea of entertainment.

Here is what I do know. The movie is loosely inspired by a true event. A drug smuggler did once jettison some cocaine over Georgia. That smuggler did subsequently die after jumping out of the plane with a faulty parachute. About three months later the body of a bear was found in northern Georgia alongside 40 opened plastic containers of cocaine. The bear did not attack any people. It died of a drug overdose. The bear has since been mounted by a taxidermist and is displayed at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky.

Creative liberties are allowed in the making of a movie. I guess it wouldn’t be very entertaining to show a bear eating cocaine and dying of a drug overdose.

Much of what happens when cocaine is consumed isn’t very entertaining. The drug is a stimulant. It raises levels of alertness, attention and energy - for a while. It is also highly addictive. Users become extremely sensitive to touch, sound and sight. They feel intense happiness for a while, but that is followed by anger and irritability and paranoia. Addicts have strong cravings for the drug and the high it brings. However, the more the drug is used, the more the brain adapts to it. It keeps taking stronger and stronger doses to achieve the high. Eventually this leads to overdose and overdose can lead to death.

In the case of the bear, it appears that its first attempt at using cocaine resulted in an overdose. There is no way of knowing exactly what happened between the time the bear ate the drug and it died, but it appears that basically what happened was the bear ate more cocaine.

You may be wondering why I am thinking of Cocaine Bear at all. After all, I don’t go to the movies very often and I haven’t seen the movie. I only know about the story behind the movie because I read an article on Wikipedia. I know about cocaine use only from drug courses taught by law enforcement officers and what I found on the Web MD web page. However, I did find myself looking into the movie because my 12-year-old grandson made a video about cocaine bear that was at least partially inspired by the trailer for the movie. My grandson, assisted by my son has made a few YouTube videos and decided to start his own channel. He likes playing with nerf guns and so his idea is to make videos that involve the use of nerf guns. He wants the videos to be entertaining and funny so they will get a lot of views. Not very many people make it big in YouTube and those who do invest significant money in equipment and time in video editing. Our grandson is a full time student and his father has a very demanding job, so making videos won’t be a high priority for either of them. They’ll pursue it when they have time around the edges of their very busy lives. So far they have uploaded two videos to YouTube.

Here is my shameless plug. I think the videos are great! I am, of course, biased. I’ve been impressed at the creativity of my grandson for quite a while now, and I know that his father is a brilliant and talented person. You should watch their videos. You can click here for the video they made about cocaine bear. As YouTube producers often say, you should subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell. Click like to help the video be seen by a larger audience. Their YouTube channel is called Foam Farm.

YouTube has at least 800 million videos. Something like 30,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every hour. 720,000 hours of video each day means no one can begin to watch all that is there. Much of it is not very entertaining. Much of it is not worth watching. But there are some exceptions. There are some funny videos. There are some educational videos. There are some entertaining videos. You can’t watch them all, but maybe you should watch this one.