The cornucopia of drugs Sonja Farak ingested while working at an Amherst lab came free to her, but make no mistake: Massachusetts will pay a heap of money to unravel her mess.
Officials first said the impact of Farak’s tampering would be limited. They were wrong. It’s now clear, thanks to a new attorney general’s report, that Farak’s years-long drug abuse spree taints drug prosecutions across the state.
It may not rival the legal tangle created by fellow chemist Annie Dookhan, whose malfeasance at the Jamaica Plain drug lab called 34,000 cases into question. As with the Dookhan affair, special court sessions will be needed to determine whether defendants were wronged because of what Farak did at her lab bench in the Morrill Science Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Meantime, thousands of drug defendants wait for answers, more than three years after Farak’s perfidy was laid bare.
Just one defendant, Erick Cotto, of Commonwealth v. Cotto, helped expose how profoundly Farak fouled the nest. A year ago, due to unanswered questions in that case, the Supreme Judicial Court ordered an inquiry into the “timing and scope” of Farak’s lab work.
The court hoped to “remove a cloud” related to Cotto’s 2009 guilty plea in a drug case, but that was wishful thinking. The answer came back last week in a 54-page report that drove similar headlines around the country: “Chemist high on drugs at work for 8 years.”
It was Farak herself, provided with immunity by the AG, who last fall detailed an astounding, and utterly sad, story of mounting addiction and a stealth campaign to take drugs not only from arriving samples but from the lab’s testing inventory. She was found guilty and served her time.
Farak insists her drug use, which began in 2004, didn’t affect the quality of her work, but that smacks of an addict’s denial and is hard to square with her reckless use of whatever she could get her hands on, as she treated the lab’s drug vault as her personal pantry. By 2009 she had used up the lab’s inventory of methamphetamine and moved on to amphetamine, cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, MDEA and even LSD. Then she dove into arriving samples provided by police.
Consider a few examples.
In January 2012, as her drug use accelerated, Farak said she sampled liquid LSD and became “very impaired.” So much so, she told AG investigators, that she didn’t drive, go to a therapy appointment or perform tests. But her notebook for that day says she did test 11 samples and produced certificates of analysis with lab findings.
Farak once took 100 grams of powder cocaine from a sample submitted for testing by Chicopee police and used it to manufacture crack cocaine at her workstation.
She got to the point where she was smoking crack 10 or 12 times a day, including at least once at lunch in October 2012 before a 1 p.m. meeting with state police investigating conditions within the lab.
She pilfered 30 grams of cocaine from a sample being tested by a co-worker and, to conceal the theft, replaced it with a counterfeit substance. She practiced forging a co-worker’s initials.
Her boss, James Hanchett, said samples seized from Farak’s bench were described in her lab notebook as being cocaine free base. But when retested, neither sample was determined to be cocaine.
There is even more bad news for the judicial system. The AG’s review found that the Amherst lab manufactured its own “reference” drugs, which are used to compare test results. That is not a common practice. The lab did not audit its supply of these drugs, also known as “standards.” And lab workers used only visual inspections to certify prescription drugs submitted for testing, raising questions about the validity of the work.
The state Department of Public Health ran a shoddy operation in Amherst, with inadequate security and non-existent monitoring of lab workers. But the lab is now managed under with better rules by the state police, so that’s no longer a policy matter.
What remains is the legal taint.
The challenge now is figuring out what’s valid in Farak’s lab work, and what’s not. Given the conduct detailed in the AG’s report, there may be no coming back. Defense attorneys have good reason to ask juries: Why take this woman’s word?
Gov. Charlie Baker says he will find money to review thousands of cases. District attorneys are racing to figure out which ones need a fresh look, but the numbers by county are mounting, according to a Boston Globe survey – 1,800 in Berkshire, 500 in Suffolk, 400 in Middlesex, 300 in Norfolk, 190 in Essex and 100 in Plymouth. The list for the upper Valley is still being compiled. The Hampden County DA estimates that thousands of cases there are in question. The Berkshire DA actually believes all cases are affected.
There are other costs here too: unfair prosecutions, lost faith in the judicial system and the likelihood that guilty people who trafficked in drugs will have punishments lifted. This toxic legal landscape will take years to clean up.