Corbella Article

Question 1

What are we being asked to believe?

Answer 1

That InSite (a safe-injection site in the downtown east side) and Vancouver itself could be responsible for Cory Monteith’s death

Question 2

What evidence are we being given to support this belief?

Answer 2

• Unscientific evidence!
• Experience: one time in Calgary, she heard people talking about going to InSite to try heroin for the first time, and when she asked her grandma where to get drugs, her grandma replied the downtown east side. Therefore, apparently everyone in Vancouver and across Canada knows that drugs are easily accessible in the downtown east side
• Intuition: the author relies on her own gut feeling, stating that “it’s safe to assume” Monteith had someone buy the heroin he overdosed on at InSite, and that if he hadn’t been in Vancouver, he wouldn’t have died
• (Dated) anecdotal evidence: the author once met a heroin-addicted prostitute in Montreal that didn’t even know where to find heroin, and when she called a random police officer in Montreal, he didn’t know either. According to the author, this proves that Monteith couldn’t have found drugs anywhere else in Canada

Question 3

What additional evidence would help evaluate possible alternatives?

Answer 3

Scientific evidence -> studies, research, statistics, etc. about InSite, safe injection sites, drug use in Vancouver, etc.

Question 4

What conclusions are the most reasonable?

Answer 4

That there are drugs in the downtown east side, but that there’s also no evidence linking InSite to Monteith’s death, nor is there any evidence that he would have lived had he been staying anywhere else in Canada