Filmmaker Erin Lee Carr’s recent docu-series “How to Fix a Drug Scandal” twinkles a spotlight on wrongdoing on several levels but its main focus is on a Massachusetts former drug lab technician named Sonja Farak.
The newest true-crime docu-series on Netflix that requires to be on your to-watch list is How to Fix a Drug Scandal, a shocking glance into how two drug lab chemists deliberately changed the proof over the course of many years and affected tens of thousands of court cases.
Over 40,000 drug convictions were excluded due to Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak’s criminal misconduct (both were sentenced for their crimes). While Dookhan spoiled evidence in the favor of the prosecution, Farak smoked it. Since Farak makes one half of the scandal, here’s what you need to know about what she did and where she is now.
Who is Sonja Farak?
Sonja Farak was born in San Diego, California and within a year her family shifted to Newport, Rhode Island after her Navy father was transferred to the east coast. As revealed in the docuseries, she confirmed that her childhood was normal and middle class. Her parents were depicted as loving, and somewhat strict.
“I was provided for in every way,” Farak testified. “I wasn’t abused and yet I still turned out a certain way, still had some problems.”
Hints of difficulties to come were not obvious as a child, at least not from the outside.
Farak’s sister Amy Farak said her sister outshined at sports. In fact, she was the first girl in the state of Rhode Island to play high school football in a public school system. This achievement earned her a full page layout in the local paper and some local TV news coverage.
“I want to be accepted like one of them,” Sonja said during the local news segment, included in the docuseries. “ You know, no special treatment.” She shone academically as well. When Sonja graduated high school in 1996, she didn’t just attain various varsity letters for sports. She was also her class’s co-valedictorian.
“If she puts her mind to something, she can do it,” Amy told the producers of “How to Fix a Drug Scandal.”
Inwardly though, Sonja Farak was striving. She was trying to suppress mental health issues, depression in specific, and she attempted to kill herself in high school, according to Rolling Stone.
After high school, Sonja went on to major in biochemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts. She graduated with high distinction. While attending college, she met her longtime partner Nikki Lee. She remained a football fan, and loved the Patriots.
Sonja received a job as a chemist at the Hinton State Laboratory building in Jamaica Plain after getting her college degree. She worked there for a year but soon understood she wouldn’t make sufficient money there in the Boston area to buy a house. She looked into the western area of the state because it was less costly and less hectic. That’s when she found a home working at a lab in the Morrill Science Building on the UMass Amherst campus. She started working there in 2004 and appreciated that it was more laid back than the job at Hinton. There were also fewer technicians, which made it manageable for her drug use to go unnoticed.
What Did Sonja Farak Do, Exactly?
As per her own court testimony, as revealed in the docu-series, Farak began working at a state drug lab in Amherst in 2004. From 2004 to 2013, Farak took benefit of the lab’s lack of supervision and stole the drugs cops had seized. Every single day, Farak would get high; the chemist used the bathroom to smoke crack and the lab facilities to cook more. Not only was she under the impact of drugs while at work for about nine years, but she was also under the impact when she took the stand in 2013.
As the docuseries represents, she confessed to a therapist in 2009 that she had been striving with addiction problems since 2005. She disclosed to her therapist that all the drugs she was consuming came from her workplace.
Farak testified that she started off trying meth in the lab because she was “curious.” She confessed that back in college she’d research drugs and noted that meth sounded like one she was especially interested in trying. When she tried it — she did so when others in the lab went out to lunch — it met her expectations.
She said “it gave me the desired effects. It gave me energy. I felt amazing.”
Farak stole the drugs (mainly meth, cocaine, and crack cocaine) because she was addicted. Rolling Stone covered both drug lab scandals in 2018 and uncovered that Farak had undergone from depression for many years. In high school, she nearly died by suicide, and in college Farak was hospitalized. Although she establish a passion for science, graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and landed a job at the Amherst state drug lab, Farak still felt “alien and unseen, a ghost floating through her own life,” per Rolling Stone. So she turned to drugs, which were incredibly easy to procure.
In order to cover her tracks, per Rolling Stone and the Netflix doc, Farak would add ersatz powder to some of the drug samples she used. Farak was smoking crack 10 to 12 times a day.
The hammer came down, so to speak, when it was discovered Farak had been high when testing drug samples from Renaldo Penate’s case. Penate had been arrested in 2011 for selling heroin. The day Farak was supposed to analyze the sample, she wrote in her diary, “tried to resist [using] @ work but ended up failing,” per the Washington Post. When testing Penate’s sample a second time, Farak had taken LSD and “the sensation of colors in the wind left her unable to function for work.” Still, when Penate’s lawyers inquired about Farak’s drug usage, the Massachusetts state prosecutors refused to give up information. Penate ended up serving close to six years in prison. Moreover, more than 24,000 cases ended up being dismissed due to Farak’s misconduct.
Her interest soon led to a regular drug habit. She started off doing drugs at work regularly — she worked while on meth, liquid amphetamine, LSD, coke and crack.
“I could not imagine being high on liquid methamphetamine and hiding it, day in, day out,” Carr told, adding that her preliminary curiosity surrounding Farak kicked off the making of the docuseries. “There was something so tragic but also surreal about this story.”
While Farak kept her drug use separated to work only at first, her use still spilled out. She started taking drugs home, and doing them first thing in the morning.
“She suffered from substance misuse disorder and she was in the worst kind of place to try to combat that,” defense attorney Luke Ryan
He went to bat for clients who were influenced by both Farak and Dookhan’s misconduct. “She really did, at certain times, tried to stop doing this but couldn’t.”
He said he feels she suffered from both a chemical dependency and a psychological dependence to the drugs.
“Those are things that cause people, including my clients, to make choices that negatively impact themselves and others. While I certainly think her longstanding refusal to acknowledge what she was doing comprised the rights of lots of people, I have sympathy for a human being who is struggling with a very difficult addiction,” he said.
The dilemma went beyond Farak, which How to Fix a Drug Scandal deeply explores. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office deliberately hid information about Farak’s misconduct and enabled defendants to be sent to prison even though the proof presented in court was changed with. According to the Washington Post, a judge who had looked into the case in 2016 described the prosecutors’ actions “intentional, repeated, prolonged and deceptive withholding of evidence from the defendants.”
In 2014, Farak was found guilty of changing with evidence, ownership of illegal drugs, and stealing cocaine from the lab. She was given an 18-month sentence, along with five years of probation.
Where is Sonja Farak now?
Farak pleaded guilty to four counts of tampering with evidence, four counts of theft of a controlled substance from an authorized dispensary, and two counts of possession of cocaine in 2014. She was convicted to 18 months behind bars, followed by five years of probation and 500 hours of community services, the same year. She cried as she was sentenced.
She was discharged in 2015 and has kept a low profile since. In 2018, all of the criminal convictions — more than 10,000 — that Farak worked on were dismissed. While what she did was immoral, many have been sympathetic to her plight.
“I think it’s very painful to be Sonja and I regret having to advocate against her,” Ryan said in the docuseries. “I mean she could have been my client.“
Farak has stayed sober, according to the docuseries.
“She isn’t on drugs anymore, and I think that that is incredible,” Carr, who also directed the true-crime documentaries “I Love You, Now Die” and “Mommy Dead and Dearest,” told Women’s Health.
The filmmaker told that she spent a lot of time thinking about Farak and trying to humanize her.
“I think she’s a good person,” she said. “I think I make a strong case and advocate that humans are fallible and she needs to be given a second chance, but that’s an unpopular opinion, and I can’t control how the public reacts to it.”
Carr said she’s been shocked to read angry reactions towards Farak over Twitter. Furthermore, she said she has been grasping with how the docuseries may have affected Farak’s life.
“I can guess that it has been very, very painful for her,” she said. “Yes, it is so exciting to put a series out and I think the series is well-reported and researched but it’s something that happened in the midst of her addiction, and she was incredibly embarrassed about it. It’s almost as if somebody would take the worst part of my life and show it to millions of people.”
The project has brought up issues Carr is still dealing with. “Am I somebody who took her personhood? I’ve been struggling with that,” Carr said “It’s very uncomfortable and I don’t know what it’s been like for her.”
Carr said that Farak is a private person. While she reached out to her family to let them know that the docuseries was coming out, she hasn’t spoken to Farak and doesn’t know much about her current life.
The docuseries did note that Farak is still a fan of the Patriots.
Farak Didn’t Fit The Stereotype Of An Addict:
In fact, Farak was highly achieved before all her battles. Farak graduated with high distinction from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and was excited about science, according to Rolling Stone.
In high school, Farak became the first girl to play high school football in the state of Rhode Island and made local headlines.
It wasn’t until she started working at a crime lab responsible for testing drugs acquired from arrests that Farak became addicted to drugs. Her job was to define whether a substance someone was caught carrying was really cocaine, meth, or something else. Farak’s findings, and occasional testimony at court about her testing, was used as proof to convict the person who had been arrested.
But it turns out that Farak was really high while running some of those tests. The four-part Netflix series goes deep into the story of a man named Rolando Penate, a case Farak had handled at the lab. After undertaking a lengthy investigation, his attorney Luke Ryan found out that Farak had been using drugs the same day she ran tests on the substances found on him, thanks to paperwork he discovered noting the date of one of Farak’s therapy sessions, where she admitted to have been using that day.
Farak started her drug use by experimenting with liquid methamphetamine, but her addiction quickly becomes a habit and she started consuming other drugs such as cocaine, and crack, which she smoked in her drug lab’s bathroom, per Rolling Stone.
