A Calgary editor who penned a column linking "Glee" star Cory Monteith's death to the Insite safe injection site and Vancouver's drug culture has received threats from angry readers.
Licia Corbella, who wrote the piece for the Calgary Herald on Friday, told CTV she has received threats over the column and "very angry e-mails" from "people who want to mete out street justice to me."
Other angry readers also wish Corbella, the Herald's comment editor, to “die of a heroin overdose," Corbellat told CTV, adding there's "people who hope that I die a long and painful death."
The threats and angry correspondence come after Corbella in her column made the connection that Monteith died in a hotel room five minutes from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which according to her, everyone in Canada, including her "strait-laced 82-year-old mom," knows is where drugs are easily available.
"Heck, ask virtually any informed person across the country and they’d be able to tell you that if you want to go on a seedy trip of your choosing — be it a heroin holiday or a crack cocaine carousal — just head down to East Hastings Street and you will find what you’re looking for with no risk of arrest," Corbella writes.
Then Corbella asserts that being so close to Vancouver's safe injection site, that is probably where the 31-year-old actor sent a gofer in search of a fix.
Monteith died from a heroin and alcohol overdose in a Vancouver hotel room last Saturday.
"It’s unlikely that the 31-year-old would have risked bringing hard drugs across the border from his home in the United States, so it’s safe to assume he either picked some up himself or had a gofer do it for him by visiting InSite, the government-sponsored and funded safe injection site at 139 East Hastings. The next step is easy. Wait for an injection drug user to show up, ask them to score you some heroin, grab a few clean, free needles and distilled water, and you’re set," Corbella continues.
None of those assertions in relation to Monteith's death, which raised a storm of outrage in social media and in the columns' comments section, have been proven.
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But Corbella defended her views over the weekend, telling the Vancouver Province that she should've worded one sentence differently, clarifying that what she meant to say was that the Calgary-born actor probably got the heroin that killed him in the area where Insite is located, not necessarily in Insite itself.
“This wasn’t a column about studies. I know that using a clean needle is better than using a dirty one,” she told the Province.
“I get that, but what is this doing? Is this creating more addicts?”
Corbella told the Province she isn't bothered by the mass of angry correspondence directed at her.