Here at the shebeen, we've been keeping a weather eye on the case of Annie Dookhan, the former chemist at the state crime laboratory here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) who went to jail for fudging her results in such a way that they consistently favored the prosecution, and thus tainted somewhere north of 40,000 cases. She was a defense attorney's worst nightmare who became an appeals judge's worst nightmare. Believe it or not, Annie got out of the sneezer a month ago. (Most of her victims served more than the brief time Dookhan spent in stir.)

And believe it or not, another case has emerged which, according to The Boston Globe, is in certain ways even worse.

Investigators for the attorney general's office found that chemist Sonja Farak had tested drug samples or testified in court between about 2005 and 2013 while under the influence of meth, ketamine, cocaine, LSD, and other drugs, according to the report, much of which is based on Farak's own grand jury testimony. She even smoked crack before a 2012 interview with State Police officials inspecting the lab for accreditation purposes, she testified.

This woman was tripping when she tested drug samples and when she helped prosecutors in court send drug offenders away for God alone knows how long. And this wasn't in the usual Wollaston Boulevard sense of, "That cop that stopped me for that pound of meth on my lap was trippin', bro." Ms. Farak actually was on LSD while she was running her lab station. I'm surprised she didn't try to marry her spectrometer. But nothing can stop our implacable drug warriors from fighting this scourge upon the land.

"Anything that went through that lab while she was there is in question," said Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. "It's too soon to know how many, but it clearly is in the thousands." Defense attorneys have pointed to Farak's alleged misdeeds for more than a year, suggesting they were more widespread than law enforcement officials believed. Tuesday's report provides the most detailed public portrait of her activities.

Yeah, who cares what those bleeding hearts think anyway?

Farak was arrested in January 2013 after a coworker discovered missing drug samples. She pleaded guilty in Hampshire Superior Court in early 2014 to four counts of tampering with evidence, four counts of stealing cocaine from the lab, and two counts of unlawful possession of cocaine, and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

In case you were wondering, the sentencing guidelines for simple possession of cocaine in Massachusetts recommend one-to-two years in jail, depending on the amount with which you get busted. This woman was found guilty of that, and of corrupting the criminal justice system, and of stealing the cocaine found in her possession, and of cooking up crack in her state lab after hours. She got 18 months. That's a pretty sweet deal. Why do I think something's getting buried here?

The newly released investigation was prompted by a ruling from the state Supreme Judicial Court last April, which said top state law enforcement officials failed to fully investigate how many times Farak tampered with drug evidence after her arrest in 2013. "This is a statewide problem," said attorney Luke Ryan, who helped bring the scope of Farak's drug use and evidence tampering to light, and who represents several defendants whose samples purportedly were tested by Farak. "The fact that we're doing this in 2016 instead of 2013 makes the job so much harder. . . . The chances of people falling through the cracks really increases."

Oh, that's why.

We are in the middle now of another drug frenzy, this one over the very real problem of opioid abuse. This time, for a number of reasons, including the racial demographic of the affected populations, it is so far being treated in our politics as a public health crisis, thank the Lord. But the cases of Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak once again reveal the garish flaws of our "war" on other drugs. Suspicion without proof. Searches without warrant. Ludicrous over-sentencing and, up and down the line in the criminal justice system, pressure to produce convictions that is so overwhelming—and, it should be said, so professionally advantageous—that people feel compelled to put both their thumbs on the scale. Country's been trippin', bro.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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