Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Introduction to Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast - Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast

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Published on:

5th Jun 2020

Introduction to Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast

The Podcast beings with the following quote from Richard Nixon's Domestic Policy Chief John Ehrlichman:

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then cimrinalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

It's with that quote that we launch a look into the war on drugs in the nation's most liberal police state Massachusetts. We will be previewing our upcoming season exploring the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal doing a deep dive on Annie Dookhan, Sonja Farak and the labs that enabled them to rig evidence that resulted in the largest violation of constitutional rights in state history.

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About the Podcast

Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast

Hosts Jamie Folk and Ilyas Rona take a deep dive into the case responsible for the greatest violation of constitutional rights in Massachusetts history

On September 28, 2012, Massachusetts state chemist Annie Dookhan was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and falsification of academic records. Approximately four months later another chemist, Sonja Farak, was arrested for using the drugs she was supposed to be testing and the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal was born.

Hosts Jamie Folk and Ilyas Rona will be exploring the William H Hinton, UMass Amherst and State Police crime labs associated with this scandal and speak with the lawyers whose clients rights were violated as a result of the fraud committed by the chemists in these labs. Through their investigation of this case, Folk and Rona have found that the crimes of Dookhan and Farak were just the tip of the iceberg and that multiple chemists from three state labs lied on the stand, knowingly sent people to jail for possessing drugs that were not illegal and wanted to help law enforcement send as many people to jail as possible.

Jamie Folk is an independent journal who has been investigating this case since Dookhan's arrest was first reported. He has obtained over 70k documents from the state and has interviewed several lawyers, journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials and others connected with the case over the past 7 years.

Ilyas Rona is a lawyer who represented a man sent to prison by Dookhan and another Hinton lab chemist for possessing what turned out to be a cashew for two years. He has been investigating the Hinton, Amherst and State Police labs ever since.

About your host

James Folk

Jamie Folk has been researching and reporting on the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal since 2013. He has worked in the biotech industry around Boston for the past 17 years in the Quality Assurance space. He was a volunteer with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections from 2010 to 2015 running the Alternatives to Violence (AVP) workshops for inmates and met many victims of these labs in prison.