Its important not to analyze things within a vacuum. To do that, is to approach something without senses, without sight, without any contradiction.
The case of Sonja Farak is one of much contradiction, on conflicting ideals and of nuance. Many people might just look at her case, and decide she is guilty, she is evil and so on. However, it isn’t as black and white as the court of public opinion might want us to believe. Farak was the result of systemic failures. Yes she made poor decisions, yes she faltered, yes she could have imposed innocent people in drug cases, however, that doesn’t mean the burden falls seldom on her.
The situation has many influences, many factors. Firstly, lets begin with the war on drugs. Nixon in 71′ began the war on drugs, likely to incriminate specific groups of people that were against the Vietnam war: Black people and Hippy’s. While despicable, it isn’t specifically that that is relevant now. It is more related to the implications of the war on drugs: mass seizures of evidence and testing.
As an example, lets look a Annie Dookhan. Yes, despicable behavior, yes dry labbing (falsifying drug tests), but why did she do this. The sheer amount of drugs that are expected to be tested forces people into a position of immediacy, where they either make the wrong decisions, or fall behind, and are robbed of personal lives.
Back to the case of Farak, there wasn’t proof of falsification, merely proof that she took drugs while testing them. Lets, once again, forget what she did, and instead dive into why she did it. Imagine for a second a day in her shoes, you get to work break of dawn and are handed potentially hundreds of drugs to analyse. The level of monotony and tedious eye stressing work would be unfathomable. What would you do? Would you stay late? would you let the untested evidence pile up? Would you be okay being shouted at by your boss? or would you maybe do something else… take stimulants… dry lab…. How certain are you that your moral fiber can withstand the weight of an entire war on drugs?