Free The Red Market by Scott Carney Page B

clinical leg up on the legal competition. Living-donor transplants are by and large more successful than cadaver donations. Patients who get kidneys from paid donors live longer than those who receive their organs from brain-dead patients.
    Despite the cost and health benefits of live organs, there is simply no ethical justification to cross legal jurisdictions and buy tissue. Brokers can make purchasing an organ easy, but organ sellers don’t talk about how selling organs changed their lives for the better.
    Almost every woman in Tsunami Nagar has a story about how organ brokers took advantage of her during her most desperate hour. One woman, Rani, complains that since her operation even walking across the village’s dirt road hurts so severely that she has to break it up into small, manageable steps.
    Rani’s troubles began when her husband lost his fishing job and took up drinking full-time. Perpetually without money Rani was unable to provide even a modest dowry when her daughter Jaya got married, and Jaya’s mother-in-law and new husband took out their disappointment on Jaya. They forced her to do extra work, doled out beatings when they saw fit, and generally made her life as miserable as possible. Within a month, she came home to her mother, said good-bye, and then tried to take her own life by drinking a quart of pesticide.
    When Rani found her daughter passed out on the small family cot, she gathered her up in her arms and carried her to a local hospital. Doctors there had seen their fair share of suicides-by-pesticide and had neutralizing agents ready. In a few hours they stabilized her, but she would have to remain in the intensive care ward for more than a week. Rani couldn’t afford the extended hospital stay, and staff members said they would have to stop treatment without a payment guarantee. Rani had to come up with money quickly or, they told her, her daughter would die.
    Over the years so many people had sold their kidneys in Tsunami Nagar that wry locals began calling the camp “Kidneyvakkam” or “Kidneyville.” Brokering kidneys was a cottage industry, with women who already had sold their kidneys brokering sales for their friends. Brokers routinely quote a high payout—as much as $3,000 for the operation—but usually only dole out a fraction of the offered price once the person has gone through it. Everyone here knows that it is a scam. Still the women reason that a rip-off is better than nothing at all.
    One of Rani’s friends had sold her kidney a year earlier and told her that a broker named Dhanalakshmi ran a tea shop outside of Devaki Hospital in Chennai as a front for her real business: proffering organs on the black market. Dhanalakshmi gave Rani $900 up front to cover her daughter’s expenses and promised $2,600 more when the procedure was over. Dhanalakshmi made it clear that if Rani backed out, thugs on her payroll would sort out the situation with violence.
    Before the transplant, Rani gave blood and urine to prove that she was a match for the buyer, who was a wealthy Muslim woman. When her blood work passed muster she was sent to the city’s General Hospital to pass an ethics review by the Transplant Authorization Committee.
    Responsible for ensuring that all transplants are legal and unpaid for, the committee is authorized to oversee and stop kidney rackets from forming in the first place. Despite its noble aims, the committee rarely lives up to its charter and routinely approves illegal transplants through brokers. Its members are meticulous about covering their tracks, and give the procedures every appearance of legality. As long as the committee hearings proceed along a mutually understood pantomime between organ sellers and buyers, the committee can say that it did everything it could to ensure the transaction was ethical. After all, everyone who appears before the committee is under oath to tell the truth. Rani’s broker had coached her to speak only when spoken to, hand