Rigged: Annie Dookhan, Sonja Farak and the Drug War in the Nation's Most Liberal Police State

This book has been nine years in the making; it is derived from court documents, grand jury testimony excerpts and police reports on arrests, investigations and prosecutions associated with the Amherst and Hinton drug-testing labs. Through these documents I discovered that the media and government officials were not giving the people of Massachusetts a true picture of events. Annie Dookhan rigged the evidence she was supposed to be objectively testing to ensure her friends in the DA's offices and police departments around the state got what they wanted: positive test results that forced defendants to take a plea deal or stipulate to all charges. She was not alone; the drug-addicted chemist, Sonja Farak, was equally culpable, and officers of state agencies both colluded in test-rigging and worked to cover up the scandal when it broke. The evidence is laid out in court documents and the words of the chemists themselves, in email correspondence obtained through hundreds of public records requests. This is a story of government malfeasance and corruption on a shocking level; the public has a right to know what their government does when they think no one is looking. Some of this story has been presented to the public in news and magazine articles and even a Netflix documentary (How to Fix a Drug Scandal), but to date no publication has told the public the whole truth of what happened at the Hinton and Amherst drug labs.