These brokers hide in the shadows.
Are you OK?
Are you healthy?
When people have no money, when they have nothing else,
kidneys are becoming the only form of currency available to them.
Yes.
Yes. Everything’s good?
Do you know you can live without a kidney?
Back in 2018,
Sangeeta Kashyap was looking forward to a fresh start.
The offer was almost too good to be true—
a stable job in Delhi with a generous salary
and the dream of building up their savings and retirement fund.
The day after her arrival,
she was taken to a clinic somewhere in the city.
She was told that her employers required a medical check.
A few days later, she overheard herself described as a kidney donor
during a hospital visit.
Despite threats, she took the matter to the police,
and her complaint was the spark that uncovered
a rampant trade in human organs
involving collusion between organized criminals
and corrupt doctors, police, and medical administration staff.
A lot of these people that we would consider
the tops of their organized crime rings are doctors.
And they’re not the ones that go out to the villages
and convince somebody to sell an organ for pennies on the dollar,
but they are the ones organizing this trade.
People with money will never sell their organs.
It’s always going to be a poor person.
Kashyap’s story is by no means unique.
Neither is the body trade a purely Indian concern.
She was just one potential victim in a global industry
that turns over an estimated $1 billion every year.
[THE BUSINESS OF CRIME]
This is
and in this episode, we’re exploring the global body trade,
the ways it operates, and the risks involved
for the desperate people at both ends of the deal
in what is an unregulated and often perilous market.
It’s exploitation at the highest degree,
so it’s literally people’s bodies being taken from them.
I was over 200,000 taka in debt.
I took the loans at different times for my family,
and I could not pay back the debt.
Black market organ transplants have a long and bloody history,
but it’s only in the last couple of decades
that the issue has exploded into a global concern.
And there’s plenty of money to be made.
A clean heart or lungs will likely set you back at least $130,000,
with a liver or kidney coming in at under six figures.
Corneas are cheapest of all, according to the same research,
coming in at a mere $30,000.
Every piece of me has the ability to make money on a market,
and I’m worth, if I were to sell it,
probably somewhere in the order of $250,000.
This is no niche concern.
It’s estimated that anything between
5 to 10 percent of worldwide organ transplants
involve illegal payment.
Kidneys are the most popular,
with the WHO estimating that 10,000 are sold every year
on the global black market.
She knew we were poor, and that my mother was in debt.
She persuaded me by talking about money all the time,
and I wanted money.
This is a story about supply and demand,
and there are very few places on Earth
where the latter doesn’t outstrip the former.
Shortage of organs for transplantation
is a constant international problem.
In the US alone, thousands die every year waiting for new kidneys.
Others, like China, employ even more creative solutions,
such as allegedly harvesting the organs of executed prisoners.
The Chinese government says it’s reformed the practice.
Now they say they only recover organs from volunteers.
But some say the practice continues.
They had these, I mean, essentially organ conveyor belts
where these prisoners would be anesthetized but still conscious
and be completely harvested.
They’d harvest their corneas, their kidneys, and their hearts.
And they would just sort of like liquidate these bodies
and then sell them, mostly to the domestic market
but also the international market.
Transactions often take place online,
with Facebook an enduringly popular marketplace.
Others operate through slightly more sophisticated scams.
In September 2021, Indian police arrested a Nigerian man in Bangalore.
Gregory Yermadeh allegedly spent three years
running an elaborate online kidney-selling ring,
duping poverty-stricken customers with fake websites
mocked up to resemble those of some of the country’s leading hospitals.
When people have no money, when they have nothing else,
they’re having to sell their kidneys,
so kidneys are becoming the only form of currency available to them.
Some have made the libertarian argument for the body trade—
why should it be illegal when demand is so high?
Surely with even the impoverished sellers getting what they need,
it’s the definition of a victimless crime?
This categorically isn’t the case.
For many, free will and consumer choice
have nothing to do with it.
Many participants in the body trade are victims of human trafficking,
tricked into giving over their organs for little to no pay.
Appalling stories are easy to find.
In October 2016, Pakistani police freed 24 people
from an apartment block in Rawalpindi.
They were due to be taken to a nearby hospital
for forcible kidney removal after months in captivity.
The police are convinced that
most of the people in that apartment were tricked
and had no intention of selling an organ when they arrived there.
They’ve arrested four people so far,
and they’ve charged them with offenses
including abducting and imprisoning people.
They say they’re now searching for four doctors
who are apparently the kingpins.
Due to its secrecy, the scale of the problem is hard to assess.
Naturally, few traffickers publicly advertise their organ farms.
In 2018,
the UN published a report detailing 700 cases of organ trafficking,
which is likely a wild underestimate.
There are no statistics out there that accurately catalog
how large the illegal market for organ trading is.
It would be ridiculous to think that mafia groups
are submitting statistical information to regulatory bodies.
The trade thrives on desperation.
Egypt is another country at the frontline of the body trade.
Refugees make for a captive client base
as they pass through on their way across the Mediterranean.
Selling organs might be the only means of paying smugglers
for uncertain passage.
They were targeted basically because of their financial situation
and because they were less likely to report anything to the authorities.
The body trade isn’t quite a straightforward tale of winners
and losers.
Misery certainly isn’t exclusive to the sellers.
Often, buyers end up in hospital with complications of their own
following botched or unsafe transplants.
They’re not necessarily being screened properly,
or they’re not necessarily being matched directly with the recipients.
There’s been studies done
with patients who have returned from overseas having purchased a kidney
and they’ve had a number of health complications,
so infections and poor outcomes
with how they’ve received the kidney itself.
Exploitation runs two ways,
a fact that illegal organ entrepreneurs are only too aware of.
Desperation makes people do previously unthinkable things.
These red markets prey on desperation.
It’s the value of human life that’s on the line here.
Nobody willingly sells a kidney on the black market
without seriously dire reasons.
Just as surely, no one is looking to buy
unless facing a grim outcome of their own.
Getting rid of predatory networks,
like those who tried to prey on Sangeeta Kashyap,
is a decent start.
But the grim fact is
there’s no shortage of others right behind them
ready to take their place in a world where demand for organs
far outstrips the legal supply.