The day Sonja Farak’s world unraveled – the day a crack pipe and sliced evidence bags of cocaine were found at her workstation – started like many others: she attended court. A drug chemist in a lab at Amherst, Massachusetts, one of the state’s two main drug testing facilities, Farak was responsible for testing evidence obtained by police. Her certified assessment of the content and amount secured thousands of drug convictions for the state, and she routinely appeared in court to affirm them; without a chemist’s signature proving an illegal substance, the charges of possession could not stand. Usually, this process was unremarkable, occurring off-stage, but Farak’s arrest on 19 January 2013 for drug theft and evidence tampering raised an alarming possibility: if she was high while at work, her tests could be thrown out, and the convictions overturned. Farak had worked at the lab for nearly a decade, contributing to thousands of prison sentences. How long had this been going on?

The arrest of the then 35-year-old Farak, depicted in the opening scenes of Netflix’s documentary series How to Fix a Drug Scandal, shocked a Massachusetts criminal justice system already reeling from another drug chemist scandal. Just six months earlier, in August 2012, Annie Dookhan, a chemist at the Hinton Labs in Boston, was caught forging tens of thousands of tests in order to win over her superiors and prosecutors as a star employee; her arrest immediately threw thousands of convictions into legal limbo. Dookhan and Farak didn’t know each other, and worked at opposite ends of the state, but their collective actions exposed a badly neglected system designed to streamline the “war on drugs”, in which the actions of one unreliable actor resounded powerfully. “It’s the sheer ripple effect,” Erin Lee Carr, who directed all four episodes of the series, said to the Guardian. “We’re not talking about 10 cases, we’re not talking about a thousand cases. We’re talking upwards of 20,000 cases that were impacted by two chemists.”

It was an unprecedented nightmare for Massachusetts, one How to Fix a Drug Scandal dissects in suspenseful yet compassionate fashion over the course of four hours, with first-person interviews from criminal defense lawyers who fought to secure release for clients convicted with faulty evidence, state prosecutors, journalists and members of Farak’s family. (Farak, now out of prison, spoke with Carr off-the-record, but declined an on-the-record interview due to an ongoing civil case.) The series also delves into a second, more insidious layer of scandal: the state attorney general office’s efforts to downplay Farak’s liability to past convictions. Whereas Dookhan’s arrest jammed court dockets with thousands of appeals and overturned numerous faulty convictions, there was near silence after Farak’s arrest, as the state attorney general’s office buried evidence of Farak’s longstanding drug addiction, blocked legal attempts to view evidence, lied to district attorneys and misled two circuit court judges – a five-year attempt to keep defendants from questioning their convictions that one judge called “a fraud upon the court”.

Carr first heard of the Dookhan scandal incidentally, during interviews for her film I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs Michelle Carter, about another sensational Massachusetts trial, in 2016. Shortly afterward, she met journalist Paul Solotaroff, who was writing a feature on the attorney general office’s misconduct and introduced her to the Farak case. Carr was familiar with the plea deal system in the US, which coerces drug defendants into plea-bargained sentences, lest they risk trial, and thus a harsher sentence. But she didn’t understand how integral crime labs were to drug convictions, or the role of criminal defendants.

Enter Luke Ryan, an amiable and dogged defense attorney from western Massachusetts who serves as How to Fix a Drug Scandal’s guide through the thicket of appeals after Farak’s arrest. Ryan pestered for years to get access to the attorney general’s files, which confirmed his suspicion – one an actor retells in a recreation of Farak’s grand jury testimony in the series – that Farak was using long before the incident leading to her arrest.

“I think a lot of people, when they encounter these cases, they’re like, ‘Well, you know, the people had drugs, and they’re guilty,’” Carr said. “And I say back to you: imagine spending a couple years in prison based on faulty evidence, and see if you feel the same way.” It’s not just the sentences hinging on accurate drug evidence tests; it’s the challenges of life post-incarceration, in which life-building steps such as getting a job or finding adequate housing are jeopardized by a drug conviction. “It does not stop the day you get out of prison,” said Carr.

A still from How to Fix a Drug Scandal. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix @ 2020

To that end, How to Fix a Drug Scandal features two of Ryan’s clients, including Rafael Rodriguez, who struggled with drug addiction and was convicted based on a sample certified by Farak. Ryan tried for years to secure Rodriguez’s freedom, which resulted in years of legal limbo and merry-go-round of prison stays which exacted a heavy toll. Rafael’s children and wife recall a goofy, kind-hearted man, one evidenced in old cellphone footage, hamming for the camera. But the conviction, which a judge kept based on the attorney general office’s withheld evidence, prevented him from moving forward.

While the series delves into the impact of mishandled evidence and, more pressingly, the state’s unrepentant “war on drugs”, Carr also provides space for the motivations of Dookhan, a first-generation striver validated for her “productivity” and helpfulness, and especially Farak. Farak’s sister and mother explain her longstanding battle with depression and feelings of invisibility, which in part fueled her drug use. Offering context for their thought processes was “a product of my sobriety”, said Carr, who has been public with her own struggles with addiction. “In my program, you are not equal to your worst actions. It’s how I was raised.” Carr’s father, David Carr, was a storied cultural critic at the New York Times whose memoir The Night of The Gun details his own addiction to cocaine and alcohol. “I’ve always encountered true crime and criminal justice reporting from a place of radical empathy,” said Carr, though she added: “I want to be clear: addiction explains everything and excuses nothing.”

Still, How to Fix a Drug Scandal outlines a much larger picture: how one addict’s actions crystallizes the arbitrariness of criminalizing addiction, how two chemists are not isolated bad apples, but symptoms of a rotten system which, of course, disproportionately and expeditiously convicts people of color. “These types of things only flourish when people assist in them,” Carr said. Boston’s Hinton Labs, now shut down, incentivized productivity and supportive relationships with prosecutors. “She was going through three, four, five times the number of cases that other chemists were – that was not normal, and it was OKed because there was such an incredible backlog in cases that they needed to get through it,” said Carr. In Farak’s case, the Amherst lab was so underfunded, understaffed and overburdened that her drug use went unnoticed for a whole decade.

“I think the system needed to be brought to task,” said Carr. The Hinton Lab is now closed, Amherst lab shuttered, but the vulnerabilities of little-seen yet consequential drug labs aren’t specific to Massachusetts. “This is a product of the war on drugs done on the cheap,” said Carr. “And we will continue to see cases like this if we don’t really take a good, hard look at drug labs and what they’re doing.”