In early 2005, Farak began using the methamphetamine standards on a daily basis. So, by her own admission, Farak was high on meth while performing all of her testing starting in early 2005. Sometimes when no one else was there, she would dip a small metal spatula into the 20-year-old meth bottle and lick it. Other times she would take a sample into the bathroom and swallow its contents. This all happened right when she got to work for energy, most people drink coffee but Sonja licked the meth spoon. To each their own, right? Remember, this was the state-controlled crime lab that was responsible for sending thousands of people to jail. Many of those convictions were based on the testing of chemists who stuck spatulas in meth bottles and licked it clean like it was mom’s brownies batter.
It eventually got to the point where Farak was bringing these amazingly delicious standards home and consuming them first thing in the morning. Farak testified that the high lasted approximately eight to ten hours and that she often ended up using meth a couple times a day. So, there was literally no point while Farak was testing drugs at the Amherst lab where she was not high on meth. Although she did testify that over the course of the next four years, she attempted to have periods of sobriety and occasionally made it a couple of weeks. Nevertheless, for the majority of this time Farak was under the effects of meth while at the lab. However, the majority of the time that Farak was off meth, she said she went through major withdrawals. According to her testimony:
“I became increasingly lethargic, tried beyond belief, wanting to sleep all day long. There were times I took a couple days off from work just because I wasn’t feeling like I could get up and go to work.”
Following those days of extreme tiredness Farak said that she would frequently experience a rebound effect in which she continued to suffer from a lack of energy and had trouble focusing. I’m sure she was doing some solid work while being so tired she could barely stay awake.
So, I know what you’re thinking, her supervisors must have been like “We have to fire this chick who can’t even stay awake at her desk”. Well friend, you are WAY off because on June 12, 2005 Farak was PROMOTED to Chemist II! Later that summer, her former supervisor Salemi found that she met or exceeded all expectations in a performance evaluation that did not include a single comment. What a solid operation they were running. In June 2008, Stevenson retired from the lab and Hanchett was promoted to Lab Supervisor II. Before leaving, Stevenson completed a performance evaluation stating that Farak excels in her analysis of samples and she is one of the top analysts in both labs. In 2006 and 2007, Stevenson had provided similarly glowing assessments like:
“Sonja is an excellent and through analyst. She is one of the top three for output in both labs (that was obviously the most important thing). She is extremely careful and through with her records.”
These were the last reviews Sonja would receive from her manager because, according to her, James Hanchett was “not a big fan of paperwork”. Indeed, during his tenure as supervisor, Hanchett did no annual personnel reviews for anyone in the lab. According to fellow Amherst employee and evidence officer Sharon Salem, there was no real reason to end performance reviews and that Hanchett was “just lackadaisical”. In Hanchett’s mind, Farak “didn’t really need a lot of oversight” and Farak was “a trusted employee” and he “harbored no doubt that she was doing the job properly”.
Trusted employee Farak testified that using narcotics on the job was “ridiculously simple.” She stated that day after day she would “go to the refrigerator, take out the bottle of meth, open it up and use a pipette to transfer a milliliter of liquid into a small vial” then “seal the main aliquot back up and put it back in the fridge.” No one would ever check the inventory in fridge to see if there was anything missing. Once Farak completed this process, which took about 30 seconds, she would keep the vial in her pocket, desk drawer or lab bench drawer until the time came to ingest the drug in a soda or during a bathroom break.
One day though Farak overheard Hanchett “complaining” about an audit he had to conduct. Farak knew this task would cause Hanchett to encounter the meth bottle and discover how low the level had gotten due to her constant use of the substance. Farak was panicked and made the questionable decision to add water to the meth bottle. The meth oil and the water didn’t mix well (You would think a chemist would know that) and the bottle looked like a hot mess right before Hanchett’s audit. However, nothing ever came of this and Hanchett just siphoned off the oil, put it in a very tiny vial and tossed the bottle. After this Sonja sought the help of a therapist. On January 15th 2009, Farak had her first meeting with a therapist named Sarah Hawrylak. During her “Diagnostic Intake” with the therapist, Farak reported having “trouble focusing” and being unhappy, irritable, unmotivated, isolated and very tired. She also declined to answer any questions about her drug and alcohol use. In her first twelve sessions, Farak focused on relationship issues and didn’t reveal that she was struggling with a drug addiction. While she was going to treatment, Sonja’s supply of meth decreased and she began examining different standards she could take to help her get through the withdrawal period.
She found a large jar of amphetamine and a couple smaller containers of phentermine. She tried both in a short period of time and came to the conclusion that the amphetamine made her feel better and was closer to the meth high and desired effects. However, because the effects of amphetamine did not last as long, she used it multiple times a day to make sure she made it through her day without having to focus too much on reality. On April 28th 2009, Farak finally admitted to her therapist that she had been using illegal substances for a long period of time. Primarily meth. According to Hawrylak’s notes, Farak confessed obtaining the drugs from her job at the state drug lab by taking portions of samples that have come in to be tested. At their next session on May 5, 2009, Hawrylak recommended that Farak consider a voluntary hospitalization on a dual diagnosis unit to address her mental health and substance abuse issues. Farak didn’t take her up on it and the sessions continued. Farak’s confession to stealing samples that were coming into the lab was significant in that no sample that entered the Amherst Lab, from that point forward, could be trusted. There is no way the state could guarantee that Sonja didn’t tamper with any evidence that was being submitted
On July 2nd 2009, Hawrylak noted that Farak was fidgety and scratched the skin on her arms throughout the session. Two weeks later she reported progress in reducing her alcohol consumption but admitted to engaging in other risky behavior on a daily basis. On August 25th 2009 Sonja told Hawrylak that she was almost out of her drug supply and she wanted to stop using. Farak said there was a close call the previous Saturday night during a routine traffic stop. Apparently, she totally forgot she had a bottle of amphetamine in her glove box. She testified that she searched for her registration and a state trooper shined his flashlight in the glove box and asked if there was a problem. She then invited the trooper to take a look in the glove box but that the trooper informed her that she had a broken taillight and let her drive home. She never said why she told the state trooper to look in the glove box but it’s my feeling that she wanted to get caught.
On September 8th 2009 Sonja admitted to Hawrylak that her drug use was still going on. According to her Grand Jury testimony it was about this time when Sonja went full Tony Montana and began using the lab’s cocaine standard. She stated that snorting this very pure powder produced the desired effect but it was a very quick high and dissipated quickly. Unlike some of the other standards Farak stole, the lab did not have an abundance of the cocaine and the fair number of cocaine submissions meant this standard was used regularly for its intended purpose. Damn those intended purposes! They were always getting in the way of Sonja’s habits!
Because cocaine was in such short supply, it was not one of the standards Farak abused on a daily basis. In late 2009, however the US Postal Service delivered Sonja’s cocaine-based dream Christmas present. They submitted cocaine totaling almost 500 grams for testing, apparently some dipshit actually shipped 500 grams of coke through the post office. Farak, of course, pinched some for personal use. When the case of the dipshit who shipped cocaine through the mail later went to trial, Farak ended up sitting on the stand and looking at coke knowing full well that she had analyzed the sample that she had pinched large amounts from. This was a line that Sonja never thought she would cross and exposed the blatant hypocrisy of the drug war in the nation’s most liberal state. She was literally sending people to jail for doing exactly what she was doing in the lab.
Farak claimed at the grand jury that this was the first piece of evidence she ever tampered with. When confronted with evidence that she told her therapist that she stole from samples and not standards prior to this case, Farak said that this was a miscommunication and what she was stealing at the time was the lab’s primary standards. I will leave it up to the reader to decide how true that statement is, but do consider the source when making your determination. Let’s better examine this source by looking at how Farak reported her drug use to her therapist. On January 19, 2010 Farak said that she decreased her use of alcohol and marijuana but had difficulty sleeping and was fatigued during the day. A week later Farak complained of daily fatigue and lack of motivation, Hawrylak reviewed Farak’s progress in treatment and noted Farak had made some gains in reducing her substance abuse. At the start of the next session, however, Farak told her therapist that she lied at her last appointment when reporting her drug use. Farak admitted that she had been using cocaine for several weeks, as well as ketamine occasionally.
The next day, Farak reported an outbreak of a significant rash to her therapist, which she attributed to abuse of her Wellbutrin prescription. At her appointment with Hawrylak on February 16, 2010 Farak denied she had been using any substances that day. She revealed she did not stop taking the Wellbutrin as her doctor recommended, in fact she took up to 800-900 mgs. The day the rash appeared (“to punish myself for using drugs” as Sonja told her therapist,) the rash unexpectedly then disappeared. Sonja’s therapist expressed alarm and concerns about her actions, yet Farak did not consider them to be serious. She pledged not to use any illegal or legal substances until the next appointment. I don’t know about you but that seems like a totally trustworthy person who defiantly wasn’t stealing any drugs being submitted by police, doesn’t it?
The question I have always had about Farak is if she was blatantly stealing drugs from the lab for years, at least one of her coworkers had to see something right? Were they all blind? Well on February 23, 2010 Farak told her therapist that “other staff at work may know about her taking samples”. This was a full two years before she was officially found out and reported. When asked about this comment at the Grand Jury, because she generally denied taking samples at this point in time, Farak suggested it was yet another miscommunication. Crazy right?
After admitted to using LSD, pot and cocaine to her therapist several times over the next few months. On May 13, 2010 Farak met with a Servicenet clinician to do an intake assessment. During this session, Farak made the following disclosures:
Starting in about 2005, she (Farak) has a history of abusing a number of different classes of drugs, including cocaine, cannabis, methamphetamine and fenfen. She had a week-long cocaine binge in March. She admits to stealing drugs from the police drug analysis lab where she works…She drives recklessly, does not feel that she has her own identity and often feels as she has no purpose or reason to do anything. She has episodes of spacing out for hours at home, and admits to worrying about what others are thinking about her at work.
Oh my! Another miscommunication! This time with a different therapist but still saying that she was stealing drugs from the police. It was almost like she was actually stealing drugs from the police and was either being coached to say she didn’t steal from submitted evidence or wanted to cover up the extent of her crimes herself. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question but neither would surprise me. By mid-2010, Farak had used all the amphetamine standard. Farak knew if anyone discovered the amphetamine jar was empty, someone in the lab would know something crazy was going on. She got the brilliant idea to replace the actual amphetamine with sodium sulphate. It was like eating all your mom’s jelly beans and replacing them with cough drops only it was illegal drugs. So now that the missing amphetamine problem was solved, that still left the problem of what drugs Sonja was going to steal to get her fix.
The temporary winner was phentermine but that didn’t give her the desired effect that she wanted so she was soon back to pulling a Tony Montana with the coke standard. I just picture her at her desk with a massive pile of coke in front of her and every other chemist in the lab with their head down doing their testing. She wasn’t only doing coke though, during this time she was also experimenting with some smaller vials of ketamine the lab had as well as ecstasy and MDEA a substance like ecstasy. Although Farak denied having any auditory or visual hallucinations she reported that when abusing stimulants, she has had perceptual disturbances in the past, including paranoia and auditory hallucinations.
Farak testified that to weigh powder samples such as cocaine she would pour the powder onto wax paper. Then after recording the weight, she would take a portion to test and return the remainder of the evidence bag. Farak stated that:
“Occasionally there was some substance left on the wax paper so when she was by herself, she licked the cocaine off the paper before throwing it away. This did not produce any sort of high but it did lead to a numbing tingling feeling on her tongue which she enjoyed.”
The thought of a chemist calmly testing evidence and then suddenly pathetically licking up the remains of her testing off her desk is certainly unsettling. The fact that nobody ever noticed this in a crime lab is truly astounding. She went on to testify that by the end of 2010 she was definitely stealing powder cocaine samples she was assigned to analyze. On February 7, 2011 she admitted to increasing her drug use to her therapist and that a possible explanation for her almost daily use of cocaine, phentermine, alcohol and marijuana was overtime work which presented “more opportunities to steal drugs.” The sad news for Sonja though was, in 2011, the drug lab seemed to be getting less and less cocaine.
During her grand jury testimony, Farak testified that when the Holyoke Police Department would drop off samples, Farak would ask: “Did you get anything good? What did you get today?” How did the Holyoke Police not question that? She also said that at this time she already exhausted the methamphetamine, amphetamine and ketamine standards and felt her next best option was smoking rocks of crack that she removed from samples coming in as evidence. Why not, right? I mean she was already Tony Montana, why not go full Pookie from New Jack City?
At first, Sonja said she wasn’t great at smoking crack. She stated that she had never been a smoker in general and did not have the proper paraphernalia. Using aluminum foil pipes was bad for her health and made a strong smell that someone would have undoubtedly detected. She then “borrowed” crack pipes that were confiscated by the police which led to better hits (thank god) but they carried germs and eventually had to be returned anyway so not an ideal solution. She finally experienced a breakthrough when she broke off the tip of a glass pipette in the lab and inserted copper mesh inside the tube. Apparently, Sonja was a genius when it came to crack pipe invention because this contraption caused her to quickly come to the realization that crack is, indeed, whack.
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony” Gandhi
