Couldawg

You say you've "found evidence" linking Altria to these bills. Altria publicly supports the bills, and duly filed lobbying records laying this all out.

You also claim that the intent of these bills is to "relax FDA restrictions" on e-cigarettes. The FDA does not have regulations on e-cigarettes. The FDA deemed itself to have the authority to regulate e-cigarettes, but hasn't done so.

You also claim that other evidence suggests that the bills are "intended to be ineffective." Assuming you wrote the article in your post, your "other evidence" consists of claims by Dr. Ruth Malone, along with claims made by John Schachter, a state-level representative of Tobacco-Free Kids (an organization that supports the effort).

According to Dr. Malone, her evidence that Altria intends this bill to be ineffective is that Altria (then Phillip Morris) internally discussed doing something like this back in 1996.

According to Mr. Schachter, his evidence is that the SCOTT Act had what he calls a "trojan horse" provision "hidden" in the bill. The SCOTT Act is roughly two pages long, and roughly half of the text consists of the language Schachter refers to as a "trojan horse." It'd be pretty difficult to "hide" a trojan horse among two pages of text, particularly if you reference the "trojan horse" from top to bottom. The bill does indeed include a definition for the term "vapor product." Why wouldn't it? The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act currently has no definition for such a product. The FDA has definitions for "cigarette," "smokeless tobacco," "cigarette tobacco," "little cigar," and more, but not for what we refer to as "e-cigarettes." If we want the FDA to regulate e-cigarettes ("vapor products"), the law first has to define what those are.

If we want to treat e-cigarettes just like cigarettes (as Schachter seems to desire), we can do that. But in order to do that, we'd have to change the FDA's definition for cigarettes. Either way, the Act's definitions would need to be changed. Either we add a definition for "vapor products," or we change one of the existing definitions to include vapor products.

In summary, your evidence consists of documents that aren't merely publicly-available... they were published and intentionally disseminated by the very people you allege to be hiding something. Your further evidence consists of select individuals opining on the motives behind these bills, based on (i) what happened 25 years ago, and (ii) an objectively improper characterization of the worst possible "trojan horse" imaginable, as a "trojan horse."

You claim to be an "investigative journalist," but you've done very little investigating. You've uncovered nothing that (again) the people you're investigating didn't already want the public to know. What you have done is taken this information, and framed and characterized it in a way that creates the impression that there is a scheme afoot. There may well be. But we wouldn't know that from your reporting.

In light of the fact that the latest bill, as you concede, "increases the legal age to 21 and truly doesn’t change much else," what exactly is the thrust of your investigative efforts? Particularly since, according to your sources, changing the age (without more) wouldn't solve the problem as you see it?

Thank you for doing this AMA. I have a numbers question, stemming from the opening paragraph in your AJC article.

The AJC found 450 cases involving doctors who were brought before medical regulators or courts for sexual misconduct or sex crimes in 2016 and 2017.

How many of doctors are subject to one of the 450 cases? A single incident can spur a board complaint and a criminal prosecution.

You also report that the doctors in almost half of these 450 cases remain licensed.

How many of these still-licensed doctors were actually found to have committed sexual misconduct or abuse?

Furthermore, how many of those doctors committed their crimes in the course of their medical practice?

I ask these questions, because the thrust of your article is that doctors who are found to have sexually abused their patients are still treating patients.

Your article describes four examples of such doctors among the pool of 450 cases. (Roberts, Burgess, Kapoor and Nassar) How many such doctors were there altogether?