He’s a doctor. He wouldn’t try to injure or kill a cyclist…would he?
Alcoholic Myth-of-the-Month
“Do you really think that a prominent local member of the community—himself in the medical profession—deliberately tried to cause harm to these cyclists?”
So asked a blogger, “Elishane,” on August 1, 2008 on Steve Hymon’s Los Angeles Times “Bottleneck Blog” in regards to Dr. Christopher Thomas Thompson, 59, pleading not guilty to charges that he intentionally slammed on his brakes, causing two cyclists to crash into his car on Mandeville Canyon Road in Brentwood, California on July 4. Thompson admitted he stopped his red Infiniti, already reportedly well-known to cyclists in the area as one to watch out for, in front of the cyclists to “teach them a lesson.” He faces felony counts for the July 4 incident and another misdemeanor count in a similar incident in March. The July incident resulted in one cyclist being flung through the rear window and the other to the pavement, resulting in serious injuries to both.
In Get Out of the Way! How to Identify and Avoid a Driver Under the Influence, I drew an analogy between road rage, for which the link between alcohol/other drugs and problems have not been closely studied, and disruptive airline passengers, for which a link was quantified in a NASA study. Roughly 43% of airline passengers whose disruptive behaviors led to pilot errors had been consuming alcohol “excessively.” Another 8% were on prescription drugs, 9% were smoking in lavatories, 15% were fighting over the use of prohibited electronic devices and 5% were bomb or hijack threats. Since there was, as I have shown there and elsewhere, a high likelihood that virtually all of these potentially destructive incidents involved an addict (intoxicated at the time or not), at least 80% of such events are likely precipitated by addicts. Why would road rage be any different from its in-the-sky equivalent?
Several of the responders on the blog wrote that Thompson deliberately tried to harm cyclists. However, no one suggested that the best explanation for such allegedly felonious behavior is alcoholism. The closest I came was finding one anonymous poster who said, “I worked with Chris Thompson in the emergency room in Montebello, for about four years. He is extremely narcissistic, a rageholic.” Another said he didn’t “want to post this guy’s personal information etc. (It has been redacted from most websites).” As is all-too-normal in the case of non-celebrity professionals, this sort of knee-jerk need to redact makes it practically impossible to confirm alcoholism, where we really need to: in people who may affect our lives profoundly, rather than in those who simply entertain us.