Mountains of coke!
"This is how much pure cocaine you'd need to enjoy this movie."
— Mike Nelson, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
A scene where drug use is depicted/described but the amount shown/said is insanely large for personal use. Something like someone suggests doing some cocaine and someone brings out a restaurant cloche (one of those huge metal plates with the large domed covers) and removes the lid to show a pile of cocaine two feet across and one foot high. Or someone says they smoked six ounces of dope last night.
Generally barring exceptional cases this doesn't happen in real life. Illegal drugs are by definition... well, illegal, and anything illicit, illegal, or otherwise prohibited that is nonetheless still in demand tends to multiply in cost accordingly.
Can be a case of bad research on the writer's part — not knowing the actual street value of the amount they are showing and how little it takes to get high, or suffer an overdose, and getting carried away by Rule of Cool.note
One form of Conspicuous Consumption. Nothing to do with Weird Weather, though it would be a definite justification for this trope.
Compare Treasure Is Bigger in Fiction.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- The New Guardians features the memorable one-shot supervillain Snowflame, a Talkative Loon who monologues at length about his devotion to cocaine and is in fact powered by the stuff, as in he gains superpowers when he's high as a kite. He is shown shoveling heaping handfuls of cocaine into his face, with the hilarious implication that he somehow snorts pounds of the stuff in mere seconds (perhaps turning 'superpowered lungs' into one of his Required Secondary Powers).
Fan Works
- Dragonball Z Abridged:
- Mr Popo supposedly consumes a gallon of LSD (which Kami is pretty sure about since he watched Popo drink it out of a milk jug), which is enough to get an entire city tripping and even manages to severely affect him, giving him (a ruthless and immensely powerful Person of Mass Destruction that briefly turned the sun off with a thought) a fairly bad trip and causing even more erratic behavior than usual.
"All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle. All these squares make a circle."- In DBZ Kai 3, which adapts the Return Of Garlic Jr Saga (rather than the joke version from Episode 31 where Mr Popo kills them all as a side-gag), it turns out that the brainwashing Black Water Mists is actually just cocaine Garlic Jr and the Spice Boys found on the Lookout and overdosed Piccolo with. According to the trapped Kami, Mr Popo leaves literal piles of it just lying around.
Kami: I tried to make French Toast the other day, and it was a bad time. I mean, first it was a good time. Very productive. But then... it wasn't.Garlic Jr: ...I want some Coke toast.
Films — Animation
- Heavy Metal: The "So Beautiful, So Dangerous" segment — Zeke and Edsel, the alien pilots, each hoist out what looks like a 25-pound bag of plutonium nyborg, lay them out in lines long enough to travel the entire ship, then proceed to snort all of it.
Films — Live-Action
- Birds of Prey: When Harley gets attacked in the police station's evidence room, she takes cover behind a pallet of cocaine bundles. The gunfire breaks multiple bundles open, blasting it into the air in the process, thus making a near literal version of this trope (the DVD commentary claims it's 452 bricks of cocaine, worth nearly $82,892,000 in total). Harley inadvertently inhales a large amount of it, and the resulting rush lets her easily take down her attackers.
- Cocaine Bear follows the chaos that ensues when several million dollars worth of cocaine falls on a Kentucky town. As seen in the trailer, a bear finds and eats an entire brick of cocaine before seeking out and ripping into more packages.
- The Crow (1994): Top Dollar is seen with a ludicrously large pile of coke from which he occasionally snorts as he gives directions to his underlings. Although not delved into in much detail, since Top Dollar is the de facto crimelord of Detroit, it's reasonable to assume that he also runs the drug trade.
- From Paris with Love: Wax shoots up a Chinese restaurant which is a front for a Triad drug smuggling operation, then has Reese carry a huge ming vase full of cocaine they collected around Paris with them. They later visit a local drug dealer who is only willing to sell them a quantity that would be reasonable for personal use, pointing out that they're not in Bogota. Wax then destroys the vase to cause every gangbanger in the area to flee, since all of them know what kind of criminal charges would befall them for being found in possession of 5 kilos of cocaine.
- Lord of War: Yuri Orlov, an Arms Dealer, is unexpectedly paid in cocaine by a Colombian drug lord. His brother Vitaly steals a kilo, then goes around Latin America visiting whorehouses. When Yuri catches up with him again, Vitaly has used all the coke to form a map of their homeland the Ukraine. Yuri stops him from snorting all of it before he overdoses.
- Mitchell: The title character does a Fingertip Drug Analysis by grabbing a handful of what turns out to be chalk.
- Scarface: Near the climax of the film, Tony is seen surrounded by piles and piles of cocaine (which makes sense since he's a dealer), and uses it to take and inflict a lot of punishment before he goes down.
Live-Action TV
- A sketch on Chappelle's Show had the Addled Addict Tyrone Biggums go on Fear Factor so that he can use the prize money to buy drugs. After being absolutely unfazed by the show's challenges (having done much grosser and more degrading things in his life to get high) and winning the prize, he uses it to buy an absolutely massive rock of crack cocaine, which he uses as an engagement gift for his girlfriend. He says that it will get them high for "hours".
- Highlander: Brian Cullin, an immortal who was famous as the best swordsman in Europe, eventually cracked under the pressure of constantly being challenged to duels by both other immortals and regular people, and by present day, he's become an Addled Addict whose erratic and paranoid behavior causes several civilian deaths. At one point, he buries his entire face in a pile of cocaine, promptly overdoses, and dies... only to revive again, since he's immortal. Shortly afterwards, he causes a bus crash that kills 25 people.
- Flashpoint: Played for Drama — a man tracks down the drug dealers who sold his brother the coke he OD'd on and is about to force one of the dealers to down his entire stockpile in one sitting before SRU catches up to them.
- In Mystery Science Theater 3000: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, Aram's computer hacking causes a heavy snowfall, indoors. Mike quips, "This is how much pure cocaine you would need to enjoy this movie."
- Two words from World's Dumbest...: "cocaine blizzard", spoken during at least one clip of criminals tossing out bags of coke while being chased by the cops.
Music
- Steel Panther: "Party Like Tomorrow Is The End Of The World" — the amount of drugs shown is ludicrous, there is so much coke that someone literally ends up with their face covered in coke in one scene.
- In The Lonely Island's "Jack Sparrow (feat. Michael Bolton)" in a parody of the Scarface scene Bolton-as-Tony Montana is shown doing this, and mentions "mountains of cocaine" in the lyrics.
Web Original
- Worm: This was integral to Lung's trigger event; Contessa, after laying a Curb Stomp on his entire gang, shoved him face-first into entirely too much cocaine...and he immediately began to overdose.
Web Comics
- Snowflame: During a fight with Batman, Snowflame grabs a double-handful of cocaine and snorts all of it on the spot, in order to fuel his powers.
Batman: [horrified] My God. What's wrong with him?
Western Animation
- Archer: At the end of the fifth season premiere, after it's announced ISIS will shut down, Archer reveals they've been sitting on "Literally — not figuratively — a ton of cocaine." Turns into a justified aversion by the end of the 5th season, as it's implied that the deal Mallory signed with the CIA involved them distributing cocaine, with that ton costing approximately 50 million dollars, a realistic price for that amount of cocaine.
- Futurama: In the episode, "Bender Should Not Be Allowed On TV", Calculon's "awesome" party on All My Circuits has, among other elements of Conspicuous Consumption, large piles of what Monique assumes is talcum powder. It might actually be talcum powder since robots can't smell, and sometimes they just do things humans do because it amuses them.
- Parodied in Metalocalypse with Dr. Rockzo's "I'm Just A Rock 'N Roll Clown" video, which features piles of cocaine the size of snowdrifts. Dr. Rockzo is even shown skiing on one of them. While that was just a music video, reality isn't that far from it - during one of the reunion attempts for Zazz Blammymatazz, Rockso drank a gallon of LSD and was so high he spent the whole show spraying a busty woman in front row with a waterhose, and during another attempt, he swallowed several condoms worth of Coke for smuggling the night before, only to eat some spicy Mexican food that made the condoms melt and caused him to O.D right on stage.
- South Park: "Cancelled" revolves around the boys trying to save Earth, revealed to be a reality show for alien viewers, from being cancelled by the Joozians (parodies of the "Jews run the media" conspiracy theories), who run all the media in the galaxy. The boys are dragged along with the Joozian executives' hedonistic lunch break, and at one point are asked if they want to do a little "blach", which is presented like alien cocaine, but instead of discrete white lines, they're huge and neon-purple. Incidentally, Kenny also tries some.
- "Medicinal Fried Chicken", being a Whole-Plot Reference to Scarface has this trope in spades, except for cocaine, they use Kentucky Fried Chicken, to the point that Cartman is snorting chicken skin by the end.
Real Life
- The infamous case of the Cocaine Bear
, in which $15 million worth of cocaine was dumped from a plane over the state of Georgia, then found by a bear that gorged itself on the drug then died. Perhaps the closest example that the world knows of cocaine literally snowing.
