Summary
Netflix’s How to Fix a Drug Scandal brings forth a state-wide fallout, involving a drug crime lab chemist tampering with key evidence in judicial cases.
Netflix documentary series How to Fix a Drug Scandal will be out on the platform on April 1st, 2020.
When crime drug lab chemist Sonja Farak was arrested for tampering with evidence by the Massachusetts police department in 2013, one must have assumed it was a charge against someone who did not abide by the law. But it wasn’t that simple. The ramifications brought a state scandal to the national frame. It was the beginnings of a judicial collapse and questions regarding the process.
Netflix’s How to Fix a Drug Scandal is not a simple docuseries to unravel. The consequences of a judicial process being ultimately flawed raised red flags. The tampering of drugs meant a considerable number of cases against civilians could have been potentially unjust, and for what cause? Well, Sonja Farak was using drugs herself, holed up in a lab with only one colleague with zero robust systems in place. And the result? An innocent person could have been wrongly imprisoned or charged with a drug-related crime.
How to Fix a Drug Scandal explores how the justice system handled the case, and how experts perceived what happened in the laboratory. There is an argument that holing two members of staff in a single laboratory doing repetitive and a high volume of cases was bound to lead to misconduct, but that was an area of the Netflix documentary that felt foggy to me; there’s no excuse for such a dim oversight. Of course, the Netflix series explores how the scandal suggested a potential cover-up, which brought forth thousands of defendants wishing for their case to be reheard.
How to Fix a Drug Scandal is a state scandal and one that required fixing during a fallout to regain the public’s trust.
The Netflix series is routinely pieced together with a reimagining of court scenes, experts giving their accounts of what happened and people who were there at the time. The documentary series even delves into top state lab chemist Annie Dookhan who fell from grace due to high-level misconduct. The docuseries tries to be thorough in the 4-part series and tries to urgently cover all aspects of a fallout that had reverberating consequences.
How to Fix a Drug Scandal is worth the time.
