This book reads like a collection of film scripts, randomly pinned together. In the sense that every story Scott Carney narrates in great macabre detail is part of a much larger story waiting to be told. They have a perfect mix of passion, violence, mystery, intrigue, voyeurism, and an occasional dash of the underworld too — a concoction that film-makers in India, perhaps even elsewhere, zealously go in for.
On the trail of the world's organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers, Carney comes up with voluminous information — some of it galling — about the thriving international trade in human parts. He spent nearly five years investigating the clandestine trade and the market that exists for human body and body parts — the ‘red market', as he calls it.
The book's jacket puts it tellingly: “The Red Market reveals the rise, fall, and resurgence of this multibillion dollar underground trade through history, from early medical study and modern universities to poverty-ravaged Eurasian labs; from body snatchers, and surrogate mothers to skeleton dealers and the poor who sell body parts to survive.”
Exploitation
Carney observes that advancements in science have been paralleled by exploitation of human beings — mostly unchronicled — and mentions his own attempt to volunteer for drug trials aimed at testing effectiveness against erectile dysfunction. At every stage, the lure is money, the human body being the primary commodity in this market.
The exploited are almost invariably the poor, the socially disadvantaged, and the downtrodden, or in certain circumstances, even prisoners. Those who sell, he says, rarely see an improvement in their quality of life. There are no long-term benefits, only risks.
Be it the women who sold their kidneys after the promise of the post-Tsunami relief money fell through, or surrogate mothers locked up in cloisters until they delivered the baby, or simply the guy who takes trial drugs because he is getting paid for it — the kidney trade has made news in Tamil Nadu at periodic intervals, and some of the cases were reported prior to Carney's investigation into ‘Tsunami Nagar'. Villivakkam, notorious in the 1990s for the large volume of kidneys sold in the area, was the first to be dubbed ‘Kidneyvakkam'. In course of time, every locality that acquired notoriety in organ sales came to get that tag.
Carney makes the pertinent point that, while some people sell their organs because of extreme poverty, the rosy future they visualise for themselves hardly ever comes true. Left without adequate medical care and nutrition, and debilitated by the side-effects of the major surgical procedure, women who donate the kidneys find themselves even more impoverished. One organ less, they are in constant pain and too weak for physical labour.
The book, in Carney's words, is in part an “investigation of what has gone wrong with the current system of tissue harvesting and body procuring.”
To place the issues in perspective, he delves into centuries of history and this leads him on to the body-snatchers of Scotland, Mukti Biswas' family bone-business near Kolkata, and the American enactments making organ donation voluntary.
It is not just kidneys and bones that Carney throws into his pot. The book is a fairly exhaustive compilation of the trade in various body parts — stem cells, ovaries, blood, babies and even hair. He does devote a considerable chunk of his investigation to the situation in India, where he has worked for years. But the Red Market map is dotted also with many other places that figure in the global human parts trade — Cyprus, Philippines, Chad, Haiti, and China.
Transparency
Carney suggests ways of tackling the situation marked by what he describes as a “neo-cannibalistic demand for transplantable organs.” Legalising organ trade is no solution. He points out how, in Iran, the legalisation brought about no improvement; it only gave legal sanction to the exploitative trade and the unscrupulous brokers engaged in it.
The key element in any solution must be utmost transparency. The organ trade, and everything about it, must be brought into the open, flushed out of the dingy recesses of graveyards, dorms, and hospitals they are secreted in at the moment. Basically, he argues, it should start with a re-evaluation of our long-held beliefs about the sanctity of the human body, altruism, and privacy.
