Episode 221: Plasma Vampires & the Blood Business feat Kathleen McLaughlin
Forget adrenochrome. There's a very real network of private companies extracting blood plasma from financially precarious Americans and selling it (and its derivatives) for piles of money on the global market. They target parts of the country in economic decline and incentivize plasma sellers to become repeat visitors to their centers, despite the physical downsides of the process. Our guest this week is Kathleen McLaughlin, author of Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Kathleen McLaughlin: https://twitter.com/kemc / https://kemc.substack.com
Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Blood-Money/Kathleen-McLaughlin/9781982171964
QAA's Website: qanonanonymous.com
Music by Max Weber. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 221 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Blood Business episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
From ancient anti-Semitic blood libel to modern-day claims of adrenochrome farms and underground bases, the idea that our blood is being extracted by a shadowy cabal looms large in the world of conspiracy theories.
Never mentioned in these claims is the practice of aphoresis, the modern process of extracting blood from the human body and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate its components, siphon off the plasma, and return the blood to the body through the same tubing and needle used to draw it in the first place.
Aphoresis is useful because the yellowish plasma, which constitutes about 55% of our blood, doesn't have a blood type.
Medical facilities as such can use it to treat patients without the need to match a donor to a recipient, which can help streamline the process of helping burn, trauma, and shock victims, as well as those suffering from severe liver disease and blood-related deficiencies.
Now, this might sound like boring technical stuff, which is why conspiracy theorists don't give a shit about it.
They want the flashy claims.
It's being taken from kids.
Satanists ritualistically abuse the children because fear spices up their blood with adrenochrome.
It's helping Hillary Clinton live forever.
Meanwhile, across the United States, hundreds of plasma centers are busy extracting blood parts from millions of people each year.
And the resulting profits are astronomical.
Tens of billions of dollars a year globally.
The people whose essential fluids this market draws from aren't terrorized children in a pizza shop basement.
They're adults of all ages looking to make ends meet for a variety of reasons.
And they're doing so in the United States, because it's one of the handful of countries in the world that allows businesses to compensate plasma donors for their blood parts.
The money they're paid is a pittance, and the companies involved flip the valuable liquid for exorbitant amounts.
The result?
An opaque industry setting up shop wherever people are desperate in America.
A map of the underclass being systematically vampirized.
To dig into this topic, our guest this week is Kathleen McLaughlin, journalist and author
of Blood Money, the story of life, death, and profit inside America's blood industry.
The book was released just a few days ago, and I found it fascinating, so I'm really
looking forward to this conversation.
Kathleen, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
I'm super excited to be here.
You have a really interesting and specific reason for getting interested in the blood trade.
And in your book, you don't mince your words.
You refer to yourself as a, quote, perpetual living vampire.
So could you just explain your condition a little bit?
Yes, so about 20 years ago I was diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune disease and it's kind of, I guess the easiest way to explain it, it is something of a cousin to multiple multiple sclerosis and most people have heard of MS and so that's a familiar thing.
Unlike MS, the treatment for my specific illness is a medication that is made from parts of human blood plasma.
So for about 20 years, off and on, every four to six weeks, I have a day-long infusion of a medication that includes thousands of people's blood particles.
And what happened, the reason I fell into this world is I get kind of bored, you know, when I have these infusions.
I generally watch a lot of bad TV.
I've seen every episode of Law & Order like seven times.
And I kind of, I I read about the medication because it's so weird, and I know it's made from thousands of people, so I would just think, where is all this blood plasma coming from?
Who is donating all of this?
It's a different process than donating blood, but we don't talk about it that much.
So I started poking under the surface of things, trying to figure out where it all came from.
And one thing that I found interesting is the difference between blood and plasma in terms of U.S.
law.
So can you kind of elaborate on that?
In essence, you cannot get paid for donating whole blood.
So everyone knows about blood donation.
You go to the Red Cross, you, you know, stick out your arm, they take your blood.
You get a nice sticker, you get some praise, you get a cookie, maybe some juice.
It's seen as a very wonderful thing to do.
You're heroic if you donate blood.
Plasma is a different story.
So plasma donation can be compensated in the U.S.
We're one of a handful of countries around the world that allows people to be paid for their blood plasma.
And in the U.S., because we have so many people living on the economic margins, this has turned into a massive business that, you know, going from thousands of college students all over the country to Mexican citizens who cross over the border to sell plasma in the U.S.
for bigger incomes than they can make back home, to kind of a proliferation of these plasma collection centers all over the Rust Belt.
And it isn't...
From my research, I don't think it was ever a very deliberate decision on the part of regulatory bodies in the U.S.
to say, oh, it's fine to pay for plasma, but not for whole blood.
I think it just happened kind of under the radar, I guess.
So there's three things you can be paid for in terms of body parts in the United States.
There's eggs, sperm, and blood plasma.
And plasma is far and away the most common of those things for people to sell.
And so, you know, before we get deeper into the modern blood trade, I wanted to kind of go back in time a little bit, because in your book, you know, you describe some of the history that led us here.
So one of the anecdotes that I was fascinated with, I think would please QAnon people in terms of almost, you know, confirming their suspicions.
It's the story of Pope Innocent VIII and three 10-year-old boys.
So what, what exactly happened there?
Well, I mean, what I was trying to find with Pope Innocent, I believe, was bleeding 10-year-old boys, or that's the lore around him.
There is this lore that goes back, and you all know this, throughout modern and older human history about adults taking the blood of children and consuming it in order to restore their youth, to restore vitality, to kind of search for eternal life.
I mean, we have this long human history of trying to find these things through the blood of the young, and it goes back as far as Pope Innocent to more modern day, you know, Silicon Valley startups trying to sell young blood plasma to older people as a youth tonic.
What I kind of did was went back through different periods of history where this theme is just prevalent for centuries.
The idea that if you consume the blood of the young, you can live forever.
At least you can look good.
Yeah, and I mean, the conclusion of that story is that the Pope died and the kids died.
You know what?
That is very often the conclusion of these stories.
I mean, you know, look at the early history of blood transfusions.
And they were experimenting in Europe with transferring the blood of animals into women.
In one really famous experiment, they were transferring the blood of sheep into women.
And you can guess the reason is because women have the brains of sheep.
That was the idea behind that.
And the patients would very often die.
I mean, it was a really gruesome history of early Blood transfusions.
So the more modern development of that, I would say, is this startup called Ambrosia, which was shut down by the FDA a couple of years ago, where a doctor who had lost his medical license started doing He opened a bunch of clinics across the United States where he was infusing the blood plasma of young people into older adults with promises that it would regenerate their youth and their health and their vitality.
There were so many potential complications from doing that that the FDA actually shut down his clinics.
So, you know, it's like, it's the same thing that we've been doing for centuries and it never really ends well.
And so, yeah, we actually covered in the past, you know, before it was found out that essentially the whole, you know, Peter Thiel backing Ambrosia thing was kind of a lie, essentially, that he was, you know, telling to promote his company.
So it is surprising to know that essentially, I mean, this is based on, like you said, bad Science, bad medicine, and that it's not really actually proven.
But the reason why people thought in the first place it might have something to it is that there were some experiments done pretty recently where they sewed mice together and made them share a, like a blood circulation?
Yeah, speaking of gruesome, so they had sold young mice to old mice to, yep, share the circulatory system and share blood in, again, another experiment to try and prove that young blood can regenerate youth in older people.
I mean, it's not surprising in so many ways because we have just done this as human beings for centuries.
Then also you look at the insane amount of money that people have in Silicon Valley.
There was a story that one of the business magazines did a few weeks ago about a man spending, what was it, $2 million a year on fountain of youth treatments that had no scientific grounding?
I mean, people spend just a ton of money Trying to recapture their youth.
And for some reason we have it in our heads that blood is the answer to that.
What's funny to me is, you know, I actually have and for 20 years have had infusions of other people's blood products.
And I don't feel any younger than I am to be honest with you.
And I don't think that I'm going to live forever.
Nothing?
Not even a little?
I mean, it works.
It works on the illness.
And I guess, you know, I could let myself believe, you know, maybe my skin looks good.
I don't know.
But it isn't.
I don't, I don't feel younger than I am.
I don't feel like youth has been restored.
There's definitely a health effect for me.
And that's proven, you know, I mean, it's scientifically borne out.
But this idea that it's somehow going to turn back the clock and let you live forever is just bonkers.
So it's not like the tonic in, um, Death Becomes Her.
No.
I mean, there is a part in the book where you kind of describe that there are unpleasant feelings.
Obviously, the infusions leave scars on your hands and there's also just, you know, tiredness or having to prepare for those infusions in the aftermath.
But you also do use the word euphoria to describe the feeling.
So do you think, I mean, is there any chance Hillary Clinton figured that out?
I have, I honestly don't have a clue.
I have no clue what goes on in my body, but I do get manic after I have one of these infusions for about 48 hours.
I get this huge burst of energy.
It doesn't last.
And I do get like, you know, bad side effects too.
I get a terrible headache, kind of feel like I have the flu, but I get this mania and I've always had it.
So I kind of think that it might just be when I have the infusions, my body is at a low point and it bounces back.
Immediately when I have one of these.
And so I just feel really good.
But I do.
I do feel different.
I feel different kind of mentally and emotionally.
And I get kind of emotional too.
So yeah, you sort of wonder, like, I don't know, am I taking on other people's Characteristics?
Because we have this belief that all of your characteristics are kind of born in blood.
It's bullshit.
Like, none of this is scientifically sound in any way.
But I do feel, yeah, very manic after an infusion.
Only for about 48 hours, though.
It's short-lived.
Yeah, maybe it's just because you're like, great, I don't have to go in and do this for another couple weeks.
I am as far away as I can be from having to come in and sit in this chair and do this all day.
That's a good theory, too.
I think it kind of makes sense because, you know, I mean, I suffer sometimes from depression and when I kind of come out of a depressive period, I do tend to kind of bounce back into this That's right.
You feel normal again, right?
You feel like a sort of like a stable, normal, calm person again.
that the painful aspects are kind of evaporating.
That's right, you feel normal again, right?
Yeah, no, very fascinating stuff.
So, I mean, now let's, I guess, take a look at what's currently happening right now in the United States.
So, you know, as we mentioned earlier, it's a country, one of like five or is it five or six, I think?
I believe it's five altogether.
Yeah.
It's a very small number.
So most countries agree you should not be able to sell your plasma for money.
But in the United States, which is the largest provider of plasma in the world, you're allowed to do it 104 times a year.
That's the max.
That's right.
Which is pretty harrowing.
That would be like every three or so days.
That's right.
Yep.
You can basically go so the ideal donor for one of the plasma companies is someone who goes twice a week, every week, all year long.
And just for comparison, if you donate plasma at the Red Cross where they don't pay you, which is purely altruistic, you're not getting any money for that, you can donate something called AB Elite Plasma if you have a certain blood type, but it's essentially plasma.
You can do it a maximum of 13 times a year.
So there's a huge disparity between how much you can give depending on if it's the Red Cross or if it's a for-profit company.
And it's kind of like you said, it's not like anybody sat down and was, you know, nefariously creating these rules.
But in a country where deregulation is the norm, you know, for decades now, it would make sense that the kind of looseness got to a point where, you know, and you mentioned this earlier, Mexican people are crossing the border because you cannot sell plasma for money in Mexico.
So they're crossing to sell their plasma at these centers that are just beyond the border.
You know, which which is an interesting thing, because, you know, people have a tendency to be like, well, you go down to Mexico to do like the weird stuff.
But it's like, no, they actually have stronger laws about this.
And so they have to come up here.
And obviously the money goes further for a person living in Mexico than in the United States.
Yeah, I mean, just that piece of it alone is super interesting to me.
A couple of months ago, I was talking to someone about this book, and I was kind of explaining the landscape to them and, you know, how all these people in the U.S.
sell plasma.
And they said to me, oh, this is really interesting.
Is there a developing country somewhere in the world that's like the big source of all the world's plasma?
And I said, yeah, it's the United States.
We are the developing country.
Like, we are the place with the huge population of people who are broke.
Yeah.
So, I mean, yeah, before we get into, I guess, like the economic reasons someone might do it, what happens to one's body when one donates 104 times a year or just even just repeatedly donates?
What are the different side effects that people experience from that?
So the main thing that I have heard from people who have this, so first of all, there are a lot of people who don't have any problems from it.
The main bad side effect that I have heard is people get Kind of a crushing fatigue.
Just very, very tired.
I've heard it described as being bone tired.
There is also the pretty well-known plasma scar.
So people who donate frequently will get a divot in their arm, one or the other, because they're going in twice a week and having a big needle stuck right in the crook of their elbow in the same spot.
So you develop these scars.
You hear about Headaches, lower protein levels.
So there is one study that shows long-term plasma donors have lower levels of protein in their blood generally because plasma is the protein component of blood.
What that means in terms of your health in 20 years, we don't know.
There isn't a lot of good science to tell us.
I've heard people say they get nauseous.
I've had people tell me they've passed out either during or after donating plasma.
And then I have, you know, I mean, I have interviewed a bunch of people who are just like, yeah, whatever.
I don't notice it.
The one thing I think the plasma companies are pretty, they're pretty careful these days about making sure to tell people that they have to drink a ton of water and they should eat a lot of protein.
So they give people kind of nutritional instructions.
I would say like 10 or 15 years ago, they weren't doing as much of that, but people are pretty well educated on what they need to eat and drink.
in order to donate, but it's really, you know, the symptoms that I've heard about are almost, I guess they sound a little bit fluey when people get sick, but there is this main one is really fatigue and then also being chilled during the process and after because they're taking your blood out, they're spinning it in a centrifuge, and then they're re-injecting the non-plasma part of the blood back into your body and just the very process of that is really, really cold.
So I can remember I was interviewing someone A young woman in Rexburg, Idaho, outside of the Plasma Center, and she had just come out and she was so cold that her teeth were chattering for the entire interview, and it wasn't that cold outside.
So you just see these.
It's different from blood donation in those ways.
There are more side effects to it, for sure.
And you mentioned, you know, the divot, which, you know, could sometimes, I mean, it has its own stigma, of course, but then people can also confuse it with track marks.
So, you know, think, oh, this person's an intravenous drug user, even though they look very different.
They're very different.
Yeah, very different.
The needle's very big because it has to have blood kind of coming back and forth.
So it has to be big enough to carry, I guess, these tubes.
And then the other thing that you explain in the book is that it's not just as simple as re-injecting it back into your body.
They also, I guess, they add a certain chemical to it.
So what's the purpose of that?
Right.
It's to keep your blood from clotting.
You know, when you put it back in, you need to have like an anti-clotting component in there so they're not re-injecting you with something that can kill you.
And that there are some people who donate who say that chemical is the thing that makes them feel icky.
But again, there just isn't that much science out there on it.
So the plasma companies will tell you this is perfectly safe.
And they monitor everyone's health in, you know, in depth over time to make sure that everyone is doing well.
And to be fair, they will do what they call defer people.
So if you get deferred, it means you can't donate for a month or six weeks.
And That will happen if you are anemic, if your protein levels are low.
You get deferred if you have a new tattoo.
There's all sorts of things that can bump you off the rotation for long-term frequent plasma donations.
So they do monitor people's health.
But the question to me is, how safe is it to do this 104 times a year?
I don't know.
How much money can people make doing this?
So, because, again, we are the United States and we have to gamify everything, it depends how often you go and you get paid more often if you go more often.
So you'll make more money in the second donation in a week than you will in the first donation.
I would say the average, and it also depends where you are in the country, the prices vary by region and demand and location, but I would say kind of a rough average is $40 per donation.
But the way it would work is you might get $40 if you go in on Tuesday.
If you go in a second time that week, you get $50 for the second donation.
And then a lot of times they'll give you an end-of-the-month bonus if you make eight donations in a month.
So, you know, you hear people who can make up to $1,000 or $1,200 a month doing this.
It's not enough to replace a full-time wage, but it's a pretty good supplement for most people.
And for Mexican citizens who are crossing over from Mexico where wages are a lot lower, it can replace a full-time wage.
And so why would they give these kind of financial incentives for the same person to come back repeatedly knowing that if there is any damage coming from this, it's going to be in the people who are doing it too often?
Is that because they're the main source of like the actual majority of the plasma?
I mean, they must be.
That would be the only reason to do it.
You know, otherwise you would just give people a much higher payment to come in once a month.
But you see, like, for example, I spent a lot of time in this college town in Idaho talking to people and kids, college kids who are younger, you know, 19 or 20 years old, I think have fewer side effects from all of this.
They're more willing to go twice a week and they really get kind of roped into it.
And yeah, I think that it just feeds the constant demand if you have people coming back twice a week, because there is perpetual demand.
We're supplying countries all over the world with plasma to make medication, not just the United States.
I have this little anecdote that comes from a friend because I was mentioning I was reading this book to them and they told me, oh yeah, in college I used to do this.
And they told me that, you know, they would go in and there was a process where they would weigh you.
And if you were over a certain weight, you would get more money.
And so they described putting weights into socks and they would come in with the weights in their pockets to weigh themselves higher so they could just make five bucks extra.
Which I guess would also put them in the danger zone because it's basically allowing them to draw more plasma than they should for their body weight.
Right.
And then they also told me that there was this, you know, kind of knowledge going around among the college students that you would get, if you smoked weed or whatever afterwards, you would get higher because your blood was thinner.
Okay, so I have heard of people drinking after.
I haven't heard the weed thing, but it makes sense.
The same thing.
But I've heard of people going to donate and then immediately after going for beers because they could have one beer and be very buzzed from that.
So the weed thing probably makes sense as well, right?
You've just taken a huge amount of your bodily fluid out.
You're going to be more prone to being lightheaded.
Yeah.
And the amount that you can donate depends on how much you weigh.
So if you weigh more, you can donate more and you get paid more.
And it's, they, it kind of puts you in a different weight class.
So it's, you know, I had more than one person in the course of this describe the whole process to me as milking cows.
And when you go inside a plasma center and see how it works, that kind of is how it feels.
Like humans are being milked for parts of their blood.
It's kind of gross.
Yeah, and you know, one of the, I guess, central aspects that your book explores is, you know, the idea of wealth disparity or people being in a precarious position, having perhaps formerly been, you know, kind of middle class and a bit more comfortable decades back.
Now that margin is getting thinner and thinner.
I wanted to kind of read this very striking passage of your book about the city of Flint, Michigan.
You also, like you said earlier, went to Rexburg.
These are kind of profiles of depressed cities, economically depressed cities, where a lot of plasma centers set up.
The center was one of the five paid extraction clinics within striking distance of downtown Flint.
That's one paid plasma center for roughly every 16,000 people, as much a marker of the city's economic decline as its notorious toxic water scandal and its pockmarked highways, both the result of an entire infrastructure built for a city that was once more than double its current size.
By comparison, Missoula, Montana, a much wealthier town that has roughly the same population as today's Flint, also has a large college campus.
A favorite target of the plasma brokers, but only one paid plasma center.
It's an industry that marks in bricks and mortars the rise and fall of wealth and struggle across America.
Often concentrated in communities, on the economic ropes, and setting up shop where people are financially unstable enough to sell their blood for gas, groceries, and money to go to the movies.
Flint is perhaps the most glaring example I've seen of the disintegration of the middle of America's working class, and how vampirism has swooped in to feed on the remains.
So first of all, you're a great writer.
Like the book is full of these moments that are, you know, just really chilling on a kind of deeper level.
There's lots of these insights, but yeah, can you explain a little bit how cities like Flint are targeted?
And, you know, I mean, we've already talked about the payment structures, but any other, any other things around that?
Well, I mean, this is an industry that pays attention to places where people need money.
And so there you'll see kind of a proliferation of paid plasma centers in the Rust Belt in these former industrial cities in Michigan, Ohio, places like that, where there are a whole lot of people living on economic hard times.
You know, the industry is not stupid.
There was a study done several years ago showing how these Plasma centers proliferate in places in zip codes that have lower incomes.
I mean, it's quite clear that this is a deliberate strategy on the part of these companies.
I think what's changed in the US in recent years is there's just a lot more people that are having a hard time making ends meet.
You know, housing prices are up.
Inflation is up.
People's wages are not keeping pace.
And so there are more and more plasma centers opening up all the time.
So the places that are the cities where I've seen more of these places are in the Rust Belt, more and more in the Rocky Mountain West, where inequality is soaring off the charts.
The South has a lot.
The most productive, and that's the plasma industry's language, the most productive centers in the country are on the U.S.-Mexico border because that's where Mexican citizens are crossing over.
You see far fewer in the northeast part of the United States where incomes are higher, people are wealthier, there isn't as much Economic precarity.
So you can really, I mean, to me, it's kind of become like the dollar store in a way, or, you know, any number of industries, but like a pawn shop, where you can see if there are a lot of these things in a community, they probably have a lot of people struggling financially.
I mean, it's really, it's really interesting how you can map out sort of the economic fault lines of the country based on where these things congregate.
And you spend a lot of time outside of these plasma centers across the country.
So what was that experience like?
And were plasma sellers eager to speak to you?
People are great.
So I would say most of the people that I talk to, and just like for context, what I would do is stand outside a center or down the block from a plasma center and wait for people to come out.
And you could tell who had just given plasma because they usually have these elastic Bandages around the crook of their arm to stop it from bleeding.
So it's almost like, you know, wounded people walking out.
And I would just hang out and ask people if I could talk to them about their experience doing it.
First of all, I think that most people don't get asked.
I think that a lot of these people are invisible in our society when they're doing something like this, right?
Most people don't get asked why they are doing this.
Secondly, I would tell people that I am a recipient of a plasma drug and I think that that was good for people to see because I can imagine if you sell plasma You might think that it's bullshit that there are people in need or it's saving lives.
Like you're not really going that deep into who is getting it.
And so I think for some people meeting me was interesting.
Interestingly, most people wanted me to not use their real names.
I think the reason is just the stigma attached to this whole Endeavor.
If you do sell plasma, there is a lot of stigma around it.
A lot of the people that I talked to hadn't actually told their own families that they do it.
Not that they think they're doing anything wrong.
They don't.
But they know there's a stigma, A, and B, they didn't want family members to worry about them, either economically or health-wise.
So a lot of people who do it aren't telling their families that they're doing it because it's such an odd little undertaking.
And that, to me, is weird if you think about it, because if you donate blood, you tell people that.
You know, you might post it on social media, or like I said, you wear a sticker.
I mean, people are very proud of donating blood.
There's nothing to be ashamed of about donating plasma, but we've created this world where it's stigmatized because it's linked to poverty.
And, you know, we don't like poor people in this country.
We should fix that, honestly.
We should create little buttons or ribbons or something that says, I gave plasma.
Totally.
I 100% agree with you on that.
And so, you know, you mentioned kind of asking these people the reason that they were there donating plasma.
And one of the back and forth that the industry plays on is the difference between, you know, they're doing it for financial reasons and they're doing it for altruistic reasons.
In your experience, first of all, what do you think of those two sides of the argument?
And then what was your experience hearing directly from people why they were doing this?
The number one reason, far and away from almost everyone I talk to, is money.
You know, people do it because it pays and it doesn't take as much time as a part-time job that might pay less.
So the money is the number one reason.
But I also think that there is a lot of altruism involved in it.
I mean, people were glad to know that I was actually getting this drug and it was going somewhere.
And if you're broke, If you don't have a lot of extra money to be able to do something altruistic and also get paid for it is kind of ideal.
So yeah, you're giving but you're also getting something for it, which I think for a lot of people that made it a good endeavor.
But far and away money was the number one reason that people Did it.
Which is also interesting if you think about blood donation because people have all sorts of altruistic, helping the community, da-da-da-da-da.
I also think with plasma, because it's a weird substance and it's not something that everyone is familiar with, there's maybe a little bit of a disconnect.
Like if you're donating plasma, you don't know necessarily where it's going or what it's making.
And so what is it making?
Well, it makes a number of different drugs that are critical in serious illnesses.
I believe the number one product made from plasma is the drug that I take, which is human immunoglobin, which is the immune system particles that are drawn from human blood and made into a concoction that treats immune disorders.
There's albumin, which is commonly used in surgery.
There's a clotting factor drug that hemophiliacs need.
So there's actually a ton of different uses for plasma.
It's just that it's an odd substance.
You know, blood is blood.
We know what blood does.
We know about blood transfusions.
But these are made into medications and used for research.
You know, they're always researching new uses for plasma drugs at the same time.
Yeah.
And again, Keeping in mind that the United States exports a hell of a lot of plasma, so this isn't just for drugs that are used in the U.S.
It's used all over.
Yeah, like plasma sounds significant.
You know, if it's just, oh, I'm giving a little bit of blood.
If you say, I'm giving plasma, you're like, whoa, now that sounds like a very serious substance that's leaving your body.
I mean, I find it so interesting that people are afraid to tell their loved ones that they're doing this because the fear is that you're giving this very important part of yourself away.
You must have no other options.
Yeah, and oftentimes that is what's happening, which is, I guess, the sad aspect of it.
Yeah, and the fact that we put this stigma attached to it is so interesting because it really is just the stigma, I think, about not being wealthy.
You know, we just love wealthy people in this country.
That's our That is heroic to be wealthy.
But if you're broke, it's somehow shameful.
And so admitting to your family that you're too broke to buy groceries probably feels shameful to people when it really shouldn't.
I mean, the fault should be on our society for not taking care of people.
I mean, that's the thing that I would love to see people think more about is why is this stigmatized when it's actually a pretty damn great thing for someone to do to donate the substance and we should treat them better.
Right, because it would be just as much of the truth to say, hey, a lot of people need the medications that is made from that.
We are one of the few countries that do it.
I'm in a healthy position where I feel like I can give.
I can get a little bit of compensation, too.
And it's a win-win.
You know, that's the truth of the matter.
And why isn't that how it's framed in sort of... Well, probably because, you know, someone sits down, they get 40 bucks for their session.
How much does a year's worth of the drug that you use cost?
I gotta do the quick math.
Hang on a second here.
It's $13,000 a dose.
So if I have 10 doses in a year, it's $130,000.
Oh my God.
So the issue here is not exactly... Oh my God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The issue here is, you know, to talk about the altruism, it's like, well, maybe if the companies had some sort of limit on the amount of money they can make flipping this into medication, but this seems, you know, this seems like a kind of people are getting a bad deal in terms of they're the ones giving, you know, this part of themselves.
And yet the profit mostly goes to these companies, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's a classic story of the for-profit, the profit-driven healthcare system, right?
There's one end and then there's the user on the other end and there are people in the middle making an awful lot of money.
So, you know, my drug is not a one-to-one thing.
I'm not having an infusion of someone else's plasma.
Like there, it's several, potentially thousands of people's particles in the drug.
You know, you have to prepare it and remove different things from it.
But the gap between $40 a donation and $13 a dose is pretty wild.
And there certainly is a lot of profit in between.
Another thing that's really interesting to me about this is that the big leaders in this industry are not all American.
Two of the biggest companies in this industry are, one is Australian and one is Spanish.
So this is really a global endeavor that's mining the blood of Americans for profit.
And so you, at one point in the book, you pretend to be applying for a job at a plasma center so you can get an idea of what's going on inside its walls, which, you know, kind of leads to these comedic moments where you yourself, you don't look at the needle going into your own arm during your injections, and here you are in a center with just people lined up and all these needles, and you're trying to pretend you're like, I can't wait to get a job!
It was so- I can't believe that I kept my composure while I was in there, to be honest, because I can't do needles.
And then I discovered that they wanted to train me to be a- not a phlebotomist, but they wanted to train me to be a person who did the needle stick, and I was like, oh my god.
But yeah, I mean, I gotta say, the people who worked in this center were great.
They were super professional.
The place was incredibly clean.
It was Very creepy.
I mean, just because it's creepy to have rows and rows of chairs where people come in to have their bodily fluids removed for money.
But I didn't find, I mean, it felt very sanitary and very mechanized.
And again, it came back to that thing about milking cows.
That's sort of what it reminded me of.
But the people were great.
The whole thing they wanted to know from me in the job interview was how good was I at customer service?
Because they want people to keep returning.
So they want people working there who know how to keep the donors happy, even when, you know, things go badly.
So, like, you hear a lot of stories from frequent plasma donors about, like, bad needle sticks and bruising and things like that.
And I had the impression that the center really valued employees who could smooth that stuff over and keep people coming back.
Yeah, I mean, maybe the employees are very kind, but you mentioned that the margins are so controlled that, like, for example, they won't give juice or snacks to somebody unless they're really going through something.
So even those small, cost-cutting measures are in place.
Yeah, I mean, they had stuff on hand in case somebody got sick or felt faint.
So again, if you go back to the Red Cross example and you think about if you donate blood, they always give you your little cookies and your little juice.
That's part of the process.
But if you donate plasma, which takes longer and is a more complicated process, you're not going to get your cookies and juice unless you're feeling really sick.
And then if you're really sick, you're not even going to enjoy the cookies and juice.
I mean, it is a consciousness preserving measure at that point.
Which sucks.
Yeah, it was very, and again, I have this, you know, I am squeamish about blood and needles.
And so being in this place and you could smell the smell of blood.
And I know that you guys know what I'm talking about.
Everyone knows what blood smells like, but you could really smell it in there.
And it was just... Oh God.
Overwhelming to think that that is this entire industry is, you know, feeding on that.
I'm getting very, very squeamy.
It's okay.
It's okay.
Listening to all this.
And also, Kathleen, Kathleen, you know, it seems a little bit counterintuitive, maybe, to sort of pull back the veil and perhaps, you know, write about some really valid criticism of this industry that also provides you this You know, medication that you, you need.
I mean, how do you, how do you sort of grapple with that in, in wanting to uncover the truth, finding some, you know, not so great things out about it.
And yet this is something that you need for your own life.
Yeah.
Might be kind of stupid, huh?
I wouldn't, no, I didn't say, I didn't say, I said, I said counterintuitive.
Okay, Jake, we're going to have to have you stop insulting the guest.
In all honesty, I have for 20 years thought about Who I'm exploiting, you know, I, it's very uncomfortable for me to be perpetually dependent on a medication that just depends on the exploitation of other people.
I think that's screwed up.
And so I think that people need to know that this is happening, that it's not a tiny little group of the population that's doing this, that it's actually big.
And more importantly, how messed up our whole economic infrastructure is that there are so many people who feel like they I have to do this.
So yeah, I might be working against my own interests here.
I don't know, but it makes me so uncomfortable personally to know that people are being exploited and I depend on that, that I feel like it's worth unearthing and letting people talk about it.
Yeah, you have so many stories in the book that describe what brought people to donate, and they're all examples that are so innocuous.
It's not always the very poorest, because you mention in the book that the homeless, for example, are immediately locked out of this.
They don't want anybody who doesn't have a home.
But you describe this young woman who said, oh, my friend is getting married, I need a dress, and basically went and donated the exact amount for the $300 so that they could go to this wedding.
It was just shocking to me how many of these stories there were and how, you know, and how these people would be like, I don't feel good afterwards.
I was dizzy or, you know, but I needed the money.
I have a full time job.
I mean, how many of these people have full time jobs and then are making time to go and essentially have, you know, oftentimes their energy sapped from them and they're tired afterwards?
Yeah, and I did hear that from a few people, too.
I mean, there are a ton of people who work full-time and still do this.
There are a ton of college students who do it instead of working, but there are a ton of people who work full-time and donate plasma for an income supplement.
And I did hear from people over the course of reporting this that it actually made it really difficult to work Full time when they were donating because it drained them.
So, yeah, I mean, we just have reached this point in this country where average incomes and middle class finances aren't enough anymore.
And so people are doing what they can to get by, or like I said before, to have a little fun.
I mean, what's wrong with people having fun?
You know, this girl that I interviewed wanted to go to her friend's wedding and she should be able to.
There's no reason that she shouldn't.
So it's a bummer that she felt like she had to sell plasma in order to do it.
And one of those stories is the story of blood for profit in the Arkansas prisons.
This was in the eighties, right under Bill Clinton?
Under Bill Clinton.
Yeah.
So the Arkansas prison system was extracting and selling the blood plasma of prison inmates, which led to a massive HIV outbreak in the blood plasma system.
And was never really, I don't think, properly addressed.
So this would have been in the 1980s and there was a growing demand for blood plasma products to make medication.
And you have, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but you have a captive donor base in a prison, right?
I mean, these guys didn't have a lot of options.
And so essentially they would get half of the payment and the prison system would take the other half.
And the blood products that were made from this prison blood were shipped around the world.
And there were lots of issues with contamination, but it took kind of a long time for that system to get shut down.
And I don't think that it was ever really... Most people that I've talked to about this hadn't heard of it.
They don't remember it, even though it was a pretty major scandal at the time.
But it is shocking.
I mean... Yeah.
And again, it just goes to that thing where we take this substance from people with the least amount of power.
And of course, they can't, you know, fight back against exploitation, right?
If you're in a prison, and they're telling you this is how you have to make money, you don't have a lot of options.
Yeah, the inmates couldn't work.
And if I remember correctly, they got paid seven bucks for a session for the plasma and they could spend that in the commissary.
So they would often do that for, you know, to buy what's needed inside the prison.
And, you know, another aspect that I just want to mention is that, yeah, you mentioned the exports and, you know, there's essentially a thousand eight hundred people in Japan who were contaminated by HIV through the American exports.
And you actually spoke to one of them.
Pretty heartbreaking.
I did.
He is the coolest guy.
So he's a member of the Japanese parliament.
And he was, I believe, he was one of the first people in Japan to go public with having been infected with HIV.
So he is in his, I believe, late 40s now, and this would have happened 30 years ago, and he's still pretty healthy.
He was a hemophiliac, and so he needed treatment with a drug that's made from blood plasma, and it was shipped to Japan from the United States and went through the Japanese healthcare system, and he contracted HIV.
A number of those people have died, and that's kind of gone all around the world.
This guy's really interesting.
He was quite a whistleblower in Japan.
He became very famous there for going public about his illness and speaking out, demanding that the government address what had happened.
There was actually, weirdly enough, I don't know why, but for some reason, this whole scandal lends itself to musicals.
There was a musical in LA a few years ago about his life story, which was quite odd, if you can imagine.
But yeah, he's a really cool dude and still with us.
Oh, that's great.
The other musical and perhaps the largest, you know, tragedy that came out of contaminated blood issues was in the province of Henan in China in the 90s.
So can you describe what happened?
Yeah, so in the 90s, China decided to create something called the plasma economy, which sounds quite dystopian.
So the concept was in this one province called Henan, which would probably be similar, I guess, to Ohio.
It's very middle America, kind of breadbasket, but lots of people.
And at that time, Henan had a lot of poor people.
So the idea was to pay people for their blood plasma and Sell it in profit-making medicines.
So this started people who had been farmers who'd never had real big incomes before started getting rich.
And there was kind of a blood plasma fever in Hunna.
But HIV crept into the system.
And what was happening then is some of the conditions in some of the clinics were quite unsanitary.
So they would reuse needles and tubing, share centrifuges.
And so if someone else had a virus that was transmitted by blood, it could get into the system and infect other people.
And that's exactly what happened.
So there were hundreds of thousands of people in that province infected with HIV.
A number of them died.
And a woman who was a doctor working in one of the government-run plasma centers basically
found out that this was going on, that people were getting HIV through the system.
And so she blew the whistle and eventually got the whole plasma economy shut down.
But she was under a lot of pressure and threats from the government for challenging the government.
So she fled and ended up in the U.S.
working as a medical researcher at the University of Utah in Salt Lake, which is where I met her.
And this would have been about two years before the pandemic that we met.
And at that time, there was, again, a musical being made about her life story, which premiered in 2019 in London.
And she went.
The Chinese government tried to get the musical shut down.
They pressured the theater company to shut it down.
They pressured her family back in China.
And not long after this, and she was young, she was in her 50s, she actually died of heart attack in the middle of all of this pressure campaign.
Yeah, people really need to pick up the book because these stories are just so fascinating.
And, you know, you kind of obviously you have this bird's eye view and you're also combining it with all these extremely human stories of people who either, yeah, were whistleblowers or donors or, you know, it's really a very, I think, like a human approach to describing something that can be Kind of abstract, right?
This is this is kind of invisible, right?
These centers, they look innocuous.
And most people probably aren't aware that, like, the United States is the main source of plasma or how many, you know, that maybe, you know, I think you were saying a million, maybe more people every year are donating.
I think it's probably in the millions.
So there are something like 50 million units of plasma collected.
So you can kind of make a guess based on that.
Some of those are going to be long-term donors.
Some of those are going to be donating once or twice.
I am certain, what I can say for certain, is millions of Americans have donated plasma.
I have no doubt about that.
What's been really interesting to me in this whole process is talking to people and telling them what I've been working on.
And if you know, you know.
So the number of people who have said to me, oh, I used to do that in college, or oh, my daughter does that, my niece does that, my brother does that, you know, there are people who Don't do it, don't generally talk about it, but it's one of those kind of hidden parts of the U.S.
that once you start talking about it, you'll find a huge number of people who have done it.
And someone interviewed me the other day for a news article, and right at the beginning she told me she used to sell plasma.
And this has been happening all the time now.
So it is hidden, but it's because I think we've stigmatized it.
And I think maybe people know that I am not judging anyone.
I'm actually really grateful that people do this.
So maybe that's a chance for people to talk about it when they know that I don't come with any judgment.
Yeah.
And one thing that I think is worth mentioning, just so people don't get the wrong impression, is that since these HIV outbreaks, we have developed techniques to essentially heat the blood, if I'm correct.
That's right.
And essentially remove any viruses that are potentially there, which makes it even more ridiculous that there was all this stigma around, you know, gay men being able to donate blood.
Yeah, totally.
And that's changing now.
Thankfully, the regulations on that are changing.
But yeah, we have blood donation and plasma donation, and the medicines made from those donations are incredibly safe right now.
So what happened in the U.S.
in the 80s and in China in the 90s is not on the table as far as things that could happen now.
The systems are much safer.
Well, that's a bit of good news in a large pile of sometimes worrying news.
I'm not going to lie.
Sometimes worrying news.
And so, you know, to bring it back to this idea of like altruism versus maybe even labor, maybe even considering these plasma donors laborers, you know, I mean, what is your take on that?
And there's this funny little story about like a 1930s blood donors union.
In New York?
Yeah, there was the Blood Sellers Union of New York, which was a chapter of the AFL for a brief moment in time.
And this was back when blood transfusions were a one-to-one process, right?
So you had to have a human on hand if you needed a blood transfusion.
Because we hadn't gotten to blood banking yet.
So you needed a live human with blood.
And there were some efforts by a doctor's group in New York to professionalize the blood donor class.
The blood donors got mad and formed a union to protect themselves.
And they had minimum payment schemes and all sorts of other things.
Unfortunately, then blood banking and other things came along and got rid of the need for live plasma donors.
Not unfortunately, that's fortunate.
But that little labor movement kind of died out.
I don't know that people could legitimately form an actual labor union right now around this issue, but I do think people could organize and at least discuss safety standards and payments with one another.
There's certainly a need for people to talk to each other about it.
You can look at Reddit.
There's a whole forum on Reddit of people who sell plasma sharing tips and all sorts of other things.
So there is some organization out there, but I do think that people, people who sell plasma have more power than they know.
And like anything else, you know, collective power matters.
It's really interesting because it's a contradiction when you take into account what happened during the Trump years where they, you know, relatively recently they told Mexican citizens they could not come up to sell because it was considered a form of essentially work, right?
That it was breaking the rules on the B-1 visas.
So in that case, I guess they're kind of admitting that it's labor, but then as soon as it would mean that perhaps, you know, you could discuss a better payment for it and, you know, then it becomes the other thing.
So do you think that we kind of live in that duality of just like, listen, we want to keep being able to exploit these people for the least amount of money to them and the most amount of money to us.
Labor, altruism, whatever the argument requires.
I mean, of course, that's our society.
That's who we are, right?
But yeah, it was very interesting to me.
So the border has reopened now.
You can, if you are a Mexican citizen, you can come back into the U.S.
to sell plasma.
There was another court ruling that flipped it back again.
And I talked to one of the guys that's in the book.
I talked to him the other day to ask if he had been back and he had just left the plasma clinic in El Paso.
So he has come back.
He said everything's kind of working as normal, but it is really interesting.
One branch of the federal government said that selling plasma constituted labor, so you couldn't come over on a day visitor visa to do it anymore.
And another branch of the U.S.
government was arguing the opposite thing in a different court case.
So yeah, I mean, you know, we will go with whatever allows people to be exploited, won't we?
Is there anything else you'd like to say before I once again plug your book and ask you where people can find it?
Gosh, I don't know.
I mean, this has been great.
I just, I think that to me, the important thing here is, you know, this is all very strange and very weird, but it's important to know that there are a lot of people who do this and we should talk about it more.
Like the fact that it has been stigmatized allows it to grow.
Quietly kind of underground and there's no reason for that.
I mean, this is something that people do and we should be more open about it.
Yes, well, yeah, and there's people more than happy to talk about, you know, the non-existent adrenochrome farms where they say that, you know, wealthy politicians are kidnapping children when the reality is it's, you know, big pharmaceutical companies.
Children are going to them for free so they can go to weddings and, you know, have a nice night out at the bar.
I don't know if children, I mean, are there children that are allowed?
I mean, you know, young people.
You have to be 18.
So college kids.
You have to be 18.
That's a child to me.
You know, I mean, that's the thing.
Like when I was in China, this idea of, and I lived in China for 15 years, right?
So I was really fascinated by this whole thing, this idea of the plasma economy.
And I was like, who would do that?
That's only China would come up with something like that.
It's so dystopian.
And then I came back here and realized that we already created it.
Nobody was paying attention.
Wow.
Yeah.
The book is full of stories, fascinating insights.
Where can people pick up a copy of it?
At your local indie bookstore or anywhere.
I mean, it's on every bookseller's website and in local bookstores.
We're going to put a link to that in the description of the episode so people can click through and figure it out.
Cool.
So where else can people follow you and your work?
I'm on Twitter.
My handle is K-E-M-C.
I have a substack, which I need to write more in, which is the same handle, K-E-M-C.
And all over the place, I write for all sorts of different media outlets, although the last couple of years I've just been working on this book, so I need to get back to other writing.
The book, again, is Blood Money, the story of life, death, and profit inside America's blood industry.
Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Kathleen.
Thank you!
That was really fun!
Thanks, Kathleen.
Listener, until next week, may the deep plasma bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
So, the purpose of that ritual that you described is for what?
It's to bring up the demonic and to get the blood as powerfully charged with adrenochrome and the The terror and the energy and hopefully they're trying to bring some of the soul energy into the blood and the pineal as well so that you get the greatest high possible.
That's why the synthetic stuff's nowhere near that charged.
Yeah.
And then the ritual and the satanic that comes up, the demonic that comes up and goes into that blood as well.
It rides that blood up from the universe.
You're opening the portal when you do that.
And that satanic then imbues that with that power in that blood as well.
