George Jung’s Cause of Death Revealed

On Sunday, George Jung’s official cause of death was finally announced to the public — kidney failure. Jung was a prolific drug smuggler in the 1970s and 1980s, and his life was the inspiration for the movie Blow starring Johnny Depp. According to a report by TMZ, Jung’s official death certificate is now available.

Jung passed away on Wednesday, May 5 at his home in Weymouth, Massachusetts. His death certificate now confirms that he died of kidney failure, which his certificate specifies as “natural causes.” He was 78 years old, and had used drugs like cocaine for years during his time as a smuggler. He also spent many years in prison for those crimes, which could have impacted his overall health as well. Jung was reportedly receiving hospice care for some time before he passed.

Jung was cremated two days after his passing and laid to rest by his wife, Ronda and his surviving friends. His death made national headlines due to his fame both as an outlaw of past decades and as a cultural figure more recently.

Jung’s story was first relayed to the public in its entirety in a biography called BLOW: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All, written by Bruce Porter. It was published in 1993 by St. Martin’s Publishing Group and became a New York Times bestseller. That success led to a movie deal that came to fruition in 2001, with Depp playing a fictionalized version of Jung.

Jung began by smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the United States in the 1970s via plane or arranging to have it smuggled to him. He continued scaling this operation up until he was arrested in 1974 and sent to a federal prison. There, his cellmate was Carlos Lehder, a young German Colombian man who helped Jung begin the career that he really became infamous for.

Once he had finished his prison sentence, Jung got connected with the infamous Medellín drug cartel through Lehder. He became central to the operations of Pablo Escobar, and is considered the most prolific cocaine importer of the era. Jung was finally caught again in 1994 and sentenced to 70 years in prison.

Jung testified against Lehder in order to reduce his sentence and got out of prison in 2014 after serving just under 20 years. He returned to his hometown in Massachusetts to live out the rest of his life there. Jung’s death certificate listed his occupation as a “storyteller” and “educator.”