Cocaine Bear and wayward wallabies: the improbable history of animals getting high

Name: Cocaine Bear.

Age: Cocaine Bear will be born on 24 February – if by birthday we mean UK cinema release date.

Oh yes, the film. I’ve seen the trailer. Looks like an important cinematic event, right?

Definitely! For students of comedy horror. Actually, it’s inspired by a real story.

So it’s a documentary? Not really. There was a bear that ate a large quantity of cocaine that had been dropped by smugglers in the Tennessee wilderness in 1985 and became known as the Cocaine Bear. Also Pablo Escobear.

Did it go crazy and kill loads of people? No, it died sadly, and was then stuffed. At one time it was owned by country singer Waylon Jennings (also an enthusiastic consumer of cocaine), before it made its way to the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, US, where it remains on display today.

Aw, that’s nice. You want more?

Cocaine? No! Animals-on-drugs stories.

What you got? I’ve got wallabies on opium. In Tasmania, where opium poppies are grown legally for the pharmaceutical industry, wallabies used to get in and eat them, “getting high as a kite and going round in circles”, said a local politician.

Trippy Skippy. More! Opium?

Stories! Well, there was an elephant imaginatively called Tusko at a zoo in Oklahoma City that in 1962 was given nearly 300mg of LSD for an experiment.

Noooo! What kind of an experiment is that? A pretty sick one: the poor animal died. Over at Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, scientists gave spiders cannabis, Benzedrine, chloral hydrate and caffeine to see how it affected their web spinning (answer: considerably).

I don’t like these experiments on animals, even spiders. Haven’t you got any nicer animals-on-drugs stories? You don’t have to look very hard on the world wide one (web) to find videos of animals drunk on fermented fruit, particularly ripe marula fruit in Africa. Then there were the elephants in China who broke in to a farm during the pandemic and drank the whisky.

Nah, those are booze stories. I want the good stuff – proper drugs. Well, more than 40% of the world’s rivers could contain harmful levels of drugs, including illegal ones. For example, a 2021 study found cocaine from the urine of Glastonbury festivalgoers got to the eels in a nearby river …

Eels on coke? Sounds slippery. Just wait until you hear about all the wild brown trout in the Czech Republic on methamphetamine.

Do say: “Just say no.”

Don’t say: “You’re safe. Bears can’t climb trees …”