The Red Market by Scott Carney

From The Week of September 17, 2012 As much as we are wont to jeopardize them with junk food and cigarettes, stimulants and depressants, our bodies are precious to us, especially when their failure threatens our existences. They are the self-repairing machines that allow us to have families, to perform work, to create beauty and to experience the world. They are the means by which we understand ourselves and the universe. And yet we ride them hard, expecting them to recover from whatever abuses we inflict upon them. Moreover, we expect science to repair them when they cannot repair themselves, confident that their hiccups will not shorten our time on this earth. But what if they do? What if we need the eyes and lungs, the hearts and the livers of others to grow old? What wouldn't we do extend our lives? Mr. Carney explores in his chilling investigation.

Wherever there is supply and demand for a product, there is a market; human flesh is no exception. From hair and skin to organ and tendon, the human body's component parts are of considerable value not only to traders in this market, but those souls desperate for a new lease on life. While some of these red markets are heavily regulated to ensure that the unfortunate aren't exploited by those of means, regulation does not eliminate the need. It merely compels the honor-bound to curtail their behavior while forcing underground all those willing to surrender their scruples to feed the need of the desperate.

From the collecting of Asian hair for sale to American women to the harvesting of the eggs of poor women for sale to the fertility-challenged, Mr. Carney immerses himself in this dark, exploitative underworld that has long-since given up on the notion of the body as sacred. He meets women who felt compelled to sell kidneys in order to procure medicine for their children. He encounters young women who saw no other option but to sell their eggs in order to make rent. He even spends time with men and women who have turned the clinical trialling of medicines into a profession, jeopardizing their longterm health for shortterm profit. If someone can live without it, someone has sold it, participating in a system worth billions of dollars, annually, very little of which flows into the hands of those who need it most.

For all its ghoulishness, The Red Market is captivating work, no moreso than in its introduction which seizes the reader by the throat and demands his full attention. Mr. Carney, a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine, converts the tragic death of one of his colleagues, abroad in Asia, into a complex journey that takes him from the slums of India to the gleaming labs of Europe, exposing, throughout, a system far from clean or transparent. He contends that, though our ethics and our legislation have the best of intentions, the notion of organ donation is a fallacy that attempts to salve our consciences, to keep from looking too deeply at the necessary costs of a market in human flesh. For while it may be that some of us agree to surrender our organs when we have no more need of them, the system that procures those organs has tangible costs both financial and moral.

Moreover, Mr. Carney makes the powerful case that the regulating of red markets, though in some sense necessary, serves to create the very forms of exploitation they are attempting to stamp out. After all, if someone's need is sufficiently great, or grave, they are not going to listen to their government decry human flesh; they are going to procure what they require. And wherever there is money willing to be spent on a thing there are people willing to take the risk of procuring that product in the hope of handsome remuneration. It is an economic principle as old as human history. Legislation has no hope of standing up to such ancient power.

Tying together economics, exploitation and the human spirit, The Red Market is a deeply disturbing examination of the extent to which we will sell our health for those we hold most dear. There are no easy answers here, but their stories cry out for justice, for some system of sanity to keep these unsfortunats from being so unmercifully used. For until science bestows us with the blessing of artificial organs, the needy will always be out there, just waiting for the desperate to give them what they require. (4/5 Stars)