After nearly a decade of working for Massachusetts State Drug Testing labs, two chemists were found to have tampered with evidence connected to tens of thousands of cases against people accused of drug trafficking and possession. How To Fix a Drug Scandal, which is now streaming on Netflix, brings to light the investigation behind the corruption and cover-ups of these cases. In this episode, Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers on…) speaks with Director and Producer Erin Lee Carr about why she chose to tell the stories of chemist’s Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan, discusses the lives of those affected by the chemist’s choices, and about her own journey to sobriety. There will be spoilers so watch all of the episodes on Netflix before listening here! A note to listeners, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this episode was not recorded in a studio. Please forgive the change in audio quality.
After nearly a decade of working for Massachusetts State Drug Testing labs, two chemists were found to have tampered with evidence connected to tens of thousands of cases against people accused of drug trafficking and possession. How To Fix a Drug Scandal, which is now streaming on Netflix, brings to light the investigation behind the corruption and cover-ups of these cases.
In this episode, Rebecca Lavoie (Crime Writers on…) speaks with Director and Producer Erin Lee Carr about why she chose to tell the stories of chemist’s Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan, discusses the lives of those affected by the chemist’s choices, and about her own journey to sobriety.
There will be spoilers so watch all of the episodes on Netflix before listening here! A note to listeners, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this episode was not recorded in a studio. Please forgive the change in audio quality.
Rebecca: Welcome to You Can’t Make This Up, a companion podcast for Netflix original true crime stories.
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Rebecca: I’m Rebecca Lavoie, your host. In each episode, we’ll take you behind the scenes of a true crime documentary or narrative feature. I sit down with the creative minds behind those films, and they answer the lingering questions you have about the stories you just watched. This week, we’re talking with Director and Producer Erin Lee Carr. Her latest work is now streaming on Netflix, and it’s called How to Fix a Drug Scandal. It’s about the investigation of two chemists who work for Massachusetts state drug testing labs. For nearly a decade, they tampered with evidence in tens of thousands of cases against people accused of drug possession and trafficking.
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Rebecca: Erin Lee Carr, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the documentary.
Erin: Wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Rebecca: I would love to know your intersection with this story.I watched some of your other documentaries. Full disclosure, I love all your work, and I love this one. It’s a local story for me. I live in New Hampshire, so this news was very familiar to me, but the deep story of it, I think, is fascinating. It is serious. It has large questions around the criminal justice system at the center of it, but what is your intersection with the story? Why did you make this documentary?
Erin: So I’m so glad to hear that. You’re my prime audience. You know, I think that there’s been a tendency in my work to really move towards tabloid, move towards these big, national cases, but as somebody that works in the criminal justice space, you know, I had kind of a sit down or a talk with myself and said, am I putting work out into the world that is meaningful? Am I trying to change or be a part of national conversations? It’s about wrongful convictions, and what is it like when the system does not protect you?And so, this was, you know, a pretty targeted, direct sort of way that I wanted to get into a criminal justice space that had a lot of lasting implications.
And sort of the cherry on the top for me specifically is, it’s really a story about drug addiction, and I have been, you know, really lucky and really fortunate to be out about my sobriety and somebody whose—my life was saved by sobriety. I feel so lucky to be part of that club, but I also kind of understand what addiction looks like, and so really being a part of discussions surrounding empathic portraits of addiction.
Rebecca: So the documentary centers, at least initially, on the story of Sonja Farak, and you spend quite a bit of time focusing on her life before this scandal. She was a high achiever in high school. She has a seemingly close-knit, extremely functional family. I’m curious why you thought it was so important to include this very full portrait of a person that maybe news consumers, especially in Massachusetts, saw a very different side of.
Erin: Yeah. I think that I don’t want to call anybody out or sort of—I want to speak specifically to my own work, but I found that some of the reporting on her was pretty one-dimensional. I think it’s really easy to paint her as the drug-addled chemist, as corrupt, as evil, but we are only as evil as our circumstances allow us to be, and I think that I have a genuine sort of inflection point of, why do people do the things that they do?And I often think it’s not about the day that we commit the crimes. It’s about all the days that came before it, and I think that that is what—this is in a long-running tradition of mine. I love true crime. I love making things about crime. I think it’s really an incredible job, but with that comes great responsibility, and so I really want to be thinking of every single person as just that, a person.
Rebecca: It was interesting to me that she was such a rising star as a young person, star athlete, you know, had been the center of news stories as a kid when she played on the boys football team, and then her achievements sort of took her to this STEM science field, but she ended up working in I think what you lay out very convincingly are pretty awful conditions. No ding on the state of Massachusetts and the way that they maybe intended to run their labs, but you really lay out a very convincing portrait that this is not a great environment that is conducive to healthy habits. It’s like a sweat shop of single-task, repetitive motion, right?
Erin: Yeah. I mean, and you’re so lovely, but you say, no ding on them, but I say, ding, ding, ding.Like there is a really—I thought it’s a very deeply problematic situation to put someone in. You know, I think that the Massachusetts drug lab, it was really underfunded, and this is somebody that yes, Sonja was high achieving and, you know, had a great sort of high school and collegiate career but struggled with mental health issues like we all do, is really universal, and when she reached adulthood, she was searching for something that would make her feel less invisible. And I understand that. I understand drugs, especially when you first start doing them, it seems like the solution, and yet it will only get worse.
Rebecca: She’s so candid, both in the footage you have of her on the stand and also in her interviews, talking about that moment where she knew she crossed the Rubicon.
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Rebecca: Can you just talk about that? As somebody who talks about your sobriety, I’m hoping you’re comfortable just sort of what it was like to capture that on film, somebody like explicitly being able to pinpoint the very moment where they made a choice and their life changed forever and really altered the course of the lives of thousands of people.
Erin: Yeah, I mean, well said. It’s pretty incredible. So in 2015, Sonja sat for something called the grand jury, and she was given immunity and said, if you tell the whole story, and so we had these like hundreds of pages where basically it was a confession, and that’s what really drew me to this story. And of course, there’s no recordings of that because it’s a grand jury. It’s sealed, and so I was left as this filmmaker, like what do I do? How do bring this material alive?
And so we ended up—which is pretty in vogue now—but we ended up recreating it and really, you know, thinking about who Sonja was and what she was doing when she did that, and so I think that it’s going into the discussion surrounding how and why do people start these things because we know that it can only end poorly. And then getting up to the point where, you know, she goes from liquid meth to phentermine to cocaine to crack cocaine, and yeah, I mean, that’s just sort of an unbelievable part of it.
Rebecca: One of the things that makes it so striking, as that story is unspooling, all of the things that she tried and then did, she gets to the point where she’s actually, you know, cooking crack rocks in the office at her job.One of the reasons that really hits home as a viewer, especially for me, is because you also have access and you interview her family members, her mother and sister. Some of these details, they weren’t privy to for a long time, but then they really share what their experience is learning this about their loved one, and that’s really affecting. I wonder what it was like to talk with them.
Erin: Yeah. I think that’s so important, and I have so much gratitude towards Sonja’s family for not just doing off-the-records, but sitting down with me and participating. They felt that they were incredibly maligned by the media specifically in terms of who Sonja was, this sort of one-dimensional portrait, so they were very distrustful, and it took a lot of sort of talking it through. And I think it really helped that I am a sober person, that I am an out sober person, and that I really said that this is not going to be that sort of same story.But you know, it was so sad, if that makes sense, to sit here with her mother, and her mother just, you know—Linda kind of felt mystified. Like, how did we get here? I tried to do my best. You know, she’s a really—Sonja was a really good kid. She played football, and there was just this sort of aura of disbelief and surrealism that permeated the entire discussion.
All of my stuff is always about the ripple effects. What happens when one crime takes place, and how many people does it affect? How to Fix a Drug Scandal is the epitome of that because it’s not just the people at the wrongful end of the convictions, but it’s the family members.It’s every single person who touched this story that sort of deal with it on a daily basis. And you know, it’s a story that was largely forgotten, you know, I think, in the Trump bubble. You know, there are these crazy stories that go viral, and this, there was some reason why this story faded from the national conversation.
And that’s why I love documentaries. I’ve taken a look at all of your other episodes, and there’s so many crime cases that it’s so good to sort of explore, and that’s why I’m so lucky to be working because yes, there’s journalism, and I feel so grateful that there’s journalism, but there’s also these many years later, deconstruction sort of what happened here, because there are real villains a part of this case that have largely gotten away with it, and you know, I always want to be careful about sort of what I say, but yeah. I mean, you know, I wanted to hold power to account.
Rebecca: Well, before we talk about Kris Foster, who I think is one of the villains in the story, I first want to talk about a different lawyer, one who I think is just an extraordinary character, and I feel like I could watch a whole series, multi-season, multipart series, about him, and that’s Luke Ryan, the defense attorney, who becomes a very central character in the story because he’s basically a crusader for clients who have been convicted based on this lab work, and he is relentless, and he is so unbelievable empathetic.What was it like interviewing him, interacting with him? Is what you see is what you get with this guy?
Erin: Well, I think that’s a beautiful thing to say, and I think this series is, in the most professional way, a love letter to lawyers. I think that they are the protector of our rights. And there are bad lawyers. There are lawyers who might not give a damn, but that is not Luke Ryan. This is a small-town lawyer that did sort of criminal proceedings that aren’t going to maybe make the paper, and this is somebody who cares a lot about everybody in our society. And you know, I think that it was very funny to sit down with Luke because—it’s very hard to make a show about lawyers because every lawyer thinks about what they’re about to say before they say it, and it was a weird couple of first interviews because he cares so much about the story, but he was so inside of it, if that makes any sense, that it’s sometimes really hard to translate. I often see my job as a translator of these sort of dense, legal cases, and how do I make it so that everybody watching Netflix understands this legal jurisdiction or this situation? But yeah, I had to interview Luke like five times.
Rebecca: I have a question about one of the sort of moral quandaries that Luke Ryan faces and that I think as a viewer I know I grappled with. So Sonja Farak’s prosecution was potentially exculpatory for his clients, one or more of his clients, and so he is like seeking material from her prosecution from the state that would help his clients in their cases. One of those pieces of material was basically her medical records around her psychology appointments and her mental healthcare. I understood why that would be important, but I also understood that that must have been a very difficult thing for him to decide to go after. We see how empathetic he is, and yet this is really key to kind of a greater justice in his mind. What did you think about that?
Erin: I mean, you’re hitting the nail on the head. This was a part of many, many, many conversations that my producers and I had because what we’re talking about here is Sonja Farak’s private therapy records, and it discloses when she started using, how much she was using, and it basically creates a timeline, so we understand how rampant the drug use was. Now I am somebody who is in therapy. I’m sure my therapist wrote notes of our sessions together. I would feel insane if somebody used those in a case against me to support a claim that I did something wrong. I know that Luke Ryan struggled with that, and so then I had this secondary sort of like, well, this is primary document that I have access to that goes to state of mind of a main character. What do I do?
And I also knew that Sonja’s family, this is what made them feel crazy. It’s not just that—and I don’t want to speak for them—it’s not just that she lost her job and her sort of reputation was mired but that her own private relationship and thoughts about her relationships and thoughts about substances were disclosed to the public, but this is what happens. I believe there was a cover up. There was a cover up in evidence. There was a complete sort of goal for a timeline not to emerge of how long this person was using drugs. It’s almost as if this is the action that had to be done, that Luke Ryan had to use the mental health worksheets, because they had not respected the Brady laws.They had not respected the exculpatory evidence.
I mean, if I were Sonja and Sonja’s family, I would be mad at these prosecutors. There was a way to have this discussion that would not have included deeply, deeply private therapy records, and so it’s all a bit of a mess. So you see in the film, you see these sort of snippets. They’re called mental health worksheets, and I have a book of them, and I just—ultimately, I did not feel comfortable having them be a primary document because I just thought it would be unethical.
Rebecca: So another huge part of this documentary focuses on a case that was more high profile locally. I mean, for those who don’t live in New England, the Annie Dookhan case in her lab on the eastern side of Massachusetts was a huge scandal because it really involved her—instead of whether or not the work she was doing could be disputed because she was under the influence of drugs, she lied. She just pretended to conduct these thousands and thousands of tests on controlled substances. But you, in some ways, draw differences between her case and Sonja’s case and in some ways draw parallels, and I’m wondering how you slice that.How are those cases different, and how are they not so different?
Erin: In a way, Annie Dookhan was kind of like the B story line because, one, it had been discussed, and two, to me, it was a bit less complex, and I think one of the only reasons why that story line works and it fits inside this show is we were able to talk to George Papachristos, and he was the DA at the time. He had never talked about his involvement or talking with Annie Dookhan. He was incredibly resistant, didn’t even want to get on the phone with me, and, you know, from the bottom of my heart, every single person who agrees to even do off-the-records with me I’m so thankful for because it’s adding to my knowledge about the case, and ultimately, that will show up and be representative in the show, in the film. So it became a larger part of the story really because I was able to speak to one of the key players, George Papachristos.
Rebecca: So I have a question about Kris Foster. She is the prosecutor who committed blatant Brady violations and lying to the court about having turned over all the documents, the lab documents that were in Sonja’s car plus these other records. You have a bunch of people on record in this documentary saying that she was green, that maybe she didn’t know what she was doing. I thought found myself wondering if it was her greenness or her having been directed to obstruct in this way. I’m curious to know where you land on that.
Erin: Putting me on the spot. And I’m so nervous about—I literally feel myself sweating because like lawyers sue people all the time, so okay.
Rebecca: It’s your opinion!
Erin: I know, but like they don’t care. All right, so you know, this is a great question, and I feel a lot of conflict about it because, you know, I was not able to get on the phone with Kris. Her lawyers met with my co-producer. I mainly wanted to sort of fact check some things, but they only saw that it would be a disservice to speak to me in any way. And so I think there are two plausible things that could have happened. One, that she was overrun because the attorney general’s office, at the time that she worked there, was receiving very high volume, and two, there could have been, hey, keep this buried, and we don’t want to look at this, so just sort of play dumb.
And you know, I think that’s why I love that we have this court audio from the Judge Carey hearings because you can see the judge and everybody inside the room really trying to work out which one of these two things it is. And you know, I guess I still feel uncertain about what it is, but I do feel certain that this is really about what does prosecutorial misconduct mean, and what exactly happened in this case? And I think some people might be like, hey, they just didn’t turn over some documents.What is the sort of big deal? You try spending two years of your life in jail when you should have been out based on a chemist doing your drug analysis while high. You tell me, were those two years worth it because they didn’t turn over a paper? That is such total bullshit, and I think that it’s a system that is designed to protect people like prosecutors and see defendants as completely disposable.
Rebecca: It’s not like she made a mistake and thought she turned everything over but hadn’t. I mean, the court found that she perpetuated a, quote, fraud on the court, which is I know it a legal term, but it essentially means she lied. She said, I’ve turned over everything, and she hadn’t, and she knew that she hadn’t, and her office knew that she hadn’t. I found that like particularly egregious.
Erin: But to me, that said more about that she was the scapegoat. She was the obvious scapegoat. You do not do your own thing as a prosecutor, as an AG, and the fact that Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek were the only people that, quote, participated in the fraud upon the court, that also smells to me. That just doesn’t make sense, and so I think Kris specifically, because she was new and green and wrote that really weird letter where she said, upon review of all the documents, everything has been turned over, and obviously we know now that these things called the mental health worksheets had not been turned over, and I just think that it just goes deeper than these two women, but they were easy for the AG’s office to sort of call out because they no longer worked there.
Rebecca: So Erin, one of the things that you do in the documentary is you focus on a couple of people who’ve been effected by all that’s going on with these labs by the state’s misdeeds in terms of withholding this evidence, and can you talk a little bit about the Rafael Rodriguez story, Luke Ryan’s client that he was fighting for for so long? He ended up dying of an overdose while he was sort of in this limbo period created by these broken systems. What was that like to put in the film, to talk to Luke Ryan about, just to sort of track that story?
Erin: So Rafael Rodriguez was a man that, you know, was really loved by his family, you know, was an immigrant, was somebody that struggled with drug addiction but was happily married, had two kids, and was embroiled in this drug lab scandal. Luke Ryan, the lawyer that we’ve been talking about, really saw this case as this can help get Rafael Rodriguez out of jail, and there was this incredible moment where the criminal justice system said, you know, there’s enough here, and we’re going to let these drug lab defendants, as they were called, out on bail, but they were out on bail with the threat of the legal system was still going to follow them. So there’s this pocket of time where, you know, Rafael didn’t know what to do. Was he going back to jail, or was he going to be able to live his life? And there was—you know, it’s almost as if the threat or the specter of continued imprisonment, it was too much for him to bear, and so this was a family where you can really see the ripple effect.
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Erin: I saw it as this sort of core emotional moment of the series that this is not just about the people that, you know, perpetrated and did the drugs because I think when you’re cold-pitching this and telling people about it, it’s about, you know, Sonja doing the liquid meth and that it’s this crazy ride and something happened here, but baked in here is this family fable of tragedy.
Rebecca: It’s also really tragic just to hear about these defendants’ experiences when they get out of prison, and we also hear about some of Sonja’s experience when she gets out of prison. Why did you want to include that?
Erin: Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of feelings that I try to keep to myself about the criminal justice system, about prisons. I think it’s really scary, the fact that when you have served your time as an individual, you get out, and it’s harder for you to get a job.It’s harder for you to drive a car, to have car insurance, because you need a job in order to pay for that, and so there is this sort of collateral damage that every single person faces when they get out of prison, and I think a lot of people would say, yeah, you do the crime, you do the time, and this is a part of it, sort of this is society watching you because of what you did. And I just know so many people through my work, through my own sort of personal life, that the fact that the criminal justice system follows you around is a really scary part of it.
And with Sonja, I think that there is a tendency that we don’t want to feel bad for the perpetrator. She did it.She knew what she was doing was wrong, and she knew tons of convictions were thrown out as a part of this, but you know, you imagine waiting at the bus stop in the freezing cold trying to make your way to your parole officer’s, so you can pee inside a cup in front of somebody in order to stay out of jail. Like that sounds not good to me, and I don’t care who are, what you did.I think the system is so punitive, and it was important on all sides to examine what happens in real time.
Rebecca: You interview so many people in this documentary, but one person you don’t get on the record on camera is Sonja herself. What would you have wanted us to see you talk about with her if you had been able to get her on camera?
Erin: You know, I was able to sit down with her and spend 70 minutes, and, you know, I don’t really want to talk specifically about the case when we sit down. It’s more about like what does your life look like now, what do you dream about, what are things that you wanted to do that you can do, and what are sort of this missed opportunities? What I really wanted to telegraph is that addiction is not the people that we always think it’s going to be, and I think that Sonja is a very clear-cut example of that.She never thought her life was going to go like this and that she was going to harm people. The only person she thought she was harming was herself.
And so it was really about understanding why people get addicted to things, what happens, and why people lie over the course of their addiction, and how these things tend to spiral. And so ultimately I believe that we were able to really telegraph that inside the show because we had her grand jury transcripts, but, you know, I don’t know what she’ll think and if she’ll watch it. I mean, there’s this moment where we have this footage of her playing—she was on the boy’s football team, and she was somebody that wanted to play football like the boys, and she was the first girl on the football team, and there’s this sort of glint in her eye, and she’s smiling. She said, you know, I like to do it. I like to be one of the boys.
And to me, I always felt a lot of solidarity in that moment as a female director in a very male-dominated world of, you know, you just want to challenge yourself. And I really wondered what it would have been like had Sonja not worked in that lab and had basically unfettered access to drugs of every type under the sun. That’s not excusing the behavior, but I just think that so many things had to happen to create this sort of tragic circumstance.
Rebecca: She liked the hits, right? That’s what she said when she was a kid. She liked the hits of football.
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Rebecca: So my final question for you is, you know, this is the kind of documentary, people who love true crime will watch it, people who are interested in issues around criminal justice will watch it, and I think people who are interested in reform will want to watch it. What are you hoping people will take away, no matter why it is that they first hit play on your film?
Erin: Yeah, I mean, I think that what I felt so lucky to do was, in episodic structure, it’s almost as if you can talk about so many different things. It’s like, I can talk about prosecutorial misconduct. I can talk about female ambition. I can talk about deceptiveness. And so all of these sort of themes came together to create this portrait, and you know, I really want us to have a hard look at the drug industrial complex. I think there has been so many series that have been done on the war on drugs, and we’re still here. Yes, we have moved away from, you know, putting people in jail for low-level marijuana offenses, but I just think we have so far to go in terms of understanding the nature of addiction, understanding why people use and sell drugs, and I really want us to continue to stop throwing addicts in jail.
And what does it mean to be a non-violent offender? My film is a part of the conversation that’s doing this. So one, I want you to feel like the detective, and I think that’s how we created it with our editors Ben Gold and Alexis Johnson. The audience is the person that is putting all these pieces together one after another, so you’re left with this, wait, what just happened, but you have all the facts. Also, I mean, I deeply hope that change happens, but you know, it’s just so hard, and it’s almost as if the criminal justice system just ignores change and kind of goes along with what it wants to do. I mean, it seems—what’s it called? It’s a bit like Teflon. All these damning portraits of abuse just sort of bounce off. When are we going to demand change?
Rebecca: Well, Erin Lee Carr, the documentary is How to Fix a Drug Scandal. I found it engrossing, fascinating. I really think it’s a must-watch. It was right in my wheel house. I think it will be in a lot of people’s wheel houses. Thank you so much for talking to me about it.
Erin: It’s a deep joy, and I’m proud of it, and I really love talking about it, and thank you so much for your thoughtful questions.
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Rebecca: We’ve reached the end of this week’s episode. Thank you so much to Erin Lee Carr. Erin has two documentaries now streaming on HBO, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth Vs. Michelle Carter and At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. Be sure to check those out. If you’re still hungry for more true crime, check out my podcast, Crime Writers On… Each week, I break down the latest true crime podcasts or hottest true crime-related TV shows and more. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review this show. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. And stay tuned for our next episode on The Innocence Files. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Netflix.Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I’m Rebecca Lavoie. Thanks so much for listening.