In the comments on the story of disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan, there was a question that came up a few times: how could this have happened?
It’s tempting to blame it all on one rogue actor, because yes, Dookhan did make a lot of terrible decisions on her own. She didn’t work in a vacuum though. She worked in a system that lacked oversight, funding, and sufficient staffing.
This is where we meet Sonja Farak.
Today’s Moment of Science… don’t dip into your own supply.
Sonja Farak was high school valedictorian and graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a biochemistry degree and a bunch of awards for academic excellence. Like so many overachievers, she’d long struggled with depression and had been in treatment for mental health issues since high school. She started using hard drugs in her brief stint in grad school in a likely attempt to self-medicate.
Farak and Dookhan worked at the Hinton Lab together for about six months before Farak requested a transfer. If you’re unfamiliar with Boston, it’s offensively expensive for a city with up to six months of cold white shit falling from the sky. Farak wanted to work somewhere she could eventually buy a home, and lo, ‘Amherst sounds wonderful’ said someone for the first time ever.
The new location came with the perk of being such a tiny, underfunded lab that it seems unlikely any individual chemist could get too much supervision. Or, more accurately, scrutiny.
Reportedly the Amherst lab had an operating budget of $300k per year. Though they had free use of the state building, the budget stretched to include everything from salaries to repairs to consumables like reagents, test tubes, and gloves. An understanding of how much these things cost paints a picture of a lab that’s some combination of understaffed, underpaid, and desperately strapped for resources.
It’s not greatly surprising that over the course of a decade under those conditions, a few pieces of evidence could have been tampered with. What made Sonja Farak’s case so entirely Jesus Fucking Christ-y was the extent of everything.
Farak admitted to first dipping into the lab’s supply after she transferred to Amherst in 2004. It started with the methamphetamine standard. In 2009 when that ran conspicuously low and she had to resort to the lab’s amphetamine standard instead, Farak unsuccessfully tried to get sober. Then things really took a turn.
She skimmed cocaine from the pieces of evidence she was responsible for analyzing, replacing some with an inert powder. From large submissions, she started cooking herself batches of crack-cocaine in the lab. Eventually she was smoking crack up to a dozen times a day, sometimes right in the fume hood or in the bathroom.
Nobody noticed a goddamn thing until the last six months when her work quality started to slip. Which makes me question a lot of things I thought I knew about drugs, because while on narcotics, she was described as an excellent chemist and reliable witness in court by her supervisor.
Then one day some samples were missing. When Farak’s supervisor went to look for them at her station, he found a crack pipe that had no Earthly reason to be there. It was over.
Farak was sentenced and served 18 months in prison, but the more profound issue was the coverup. When attorneys representing clients with drug charges tried to inquire about the Farak case, the state stonewalled. It was only a few specific cases, the state’s assistant attorneys general claimed, and not years of this fuckery. They almost certainly knew this wasn’t true, but paperwork is such a bummer and who wants to do the hard work of helping people who went to jail for this bullshit drug war?
Internal documents were released that revealed the state absolutely knew of Farak’s drug issues dating back to at least 2005 when she was suspected of stealing cocaine from a criminal case.
It’s possible that Sonja Farak’s drug use never caused a single error in testing; she stated that she wanted to be accurate so that she’d know what she was getting high on. She wasn’t dry labbing or spiking samples like Annie Dookhan, but per some of her own records, she was having hallucinations and visual disturbances from the drugs she was taking at work. Which, to be fair, is a super fun way to play with volatile chemicals if you only value some of your fingers. But it’s some sort of sick twisted joke to be loaded on the very drugs you’re sending people away for while getting paid by the state to analyze them.
To date, over 24,000 convictions in 16,000 cases that Farak worked on have been dismissed.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, pretty sure we could start treating drug addiction like a medical issue instead of a criminal one but we’re not a good enough society to try it.
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