Sure, it's an indictment, not a conviction. Whatever you might think of the government's case, it's false to say that "no one has claimed" Assange assisted Manning. The government is clearly making that claim in the indictment.
In terms of recreational nicotine, Swedish snus has the most established, long term evidence base for very significantly reduced risks.
It's reasonable to expect that a product like Zyn would fare even better than Swedish snus in long term studies because of the lack of tobacco specific nitrosamines. Although Zyn doesn't have a long term, formulation specific evidence base like Swedish snus, there is good evidence for its components.
Pharmaceutical nicotine replacement therapy products like nicotine gum could be options too. Guessing you've already tried that though... but even the FDA now says NRT can be used indefinitely.
In that case I would see it like rl3 too, and would probably respond best to a frank disclosure upfront. Maybe your career isn't as over as it feels right now, but will just take more time to find the right place?
Of course how much you disclose is totally your business, and I can't speak for the person you're replying to. But for me this isn't enough to go on, because your questions seem to be about others' perceptions of this as a risk.
The bit about duplicates likely being "unintentional at this scale" is an important part of the use context too though. There are many cases where allowing duplicate names increases errors and confusion for users -- not only because of unintentional duplication, but because users themselves often think of names as unique.
To me, surrogate keys are just about always preferable over natural keys, but it's also important to think about the "naturalness" of natural keys from a user's pov. In some contexts, using a surrogate key while also enforcing unique names (with the rare possibility of a case where an admin has to go in and do something weird like add a genuinely identical name with a "2" after it, say) can be a better trade-off.
Lots of people in health research do treat pubmed as a gatekeeper though (sometimes foolishly imo). It is more exclusive than both Google Scholar and arxiv -- but also like you say, not a guarantee of quality + not the kind of resource where you can read one article and be like "here's what NIH says."
So semantics, I guess. Just felt compelled to mention it, probably more because it frustrates me to see health researchers use pubmed as their only gateway to scholarly lit.
Seems that way, I know, to some of my friends who don't work in the same field as me (health research), but pubmed doesn't include all biomedical journals, and it's not a place where anyone can archive papers independently. Which isn't to say that everything in pubmed is high quality or that it's a great gatekeeper, but yeah, it definitely excludes material.