The Red Market (23 page)

Back at the Raj Impex factory, workers will comb out literally thousands of similar dreaded hair balls. Once the hair is separated, workers will bundle it into batches and sew it onto cloth strips. Processing nonremy hair is extremely labor-intensive, but only about a third as lucrative. If it’s long enough it goes into budget-priced wigs. Otherwise it is transformed into mattress stuffing or boiled down into food additives. Still, with hundreds of thousands of tons of it available, the hair resellers can find a way to profit from it. Like any other commodities market, plentiful supply of cheap hair means that someone will find a way to make use of it and spur demand somewhere.

From Chennai the best quality hair travels to almost every beauty parlor and hair salon on the planet, but, as mentioned earlier, finds its most profitable reception in predominantly African American neighborhoods where customers value Indian hair for its dark, luxurious hues and straightness. One of those places, the Grooming Room on Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue, a street so densely packed with beauty outlets that it almost seems zoned for that purpose, is managed by Tiffany Brown, a high priestess of hairstyles. When I first meet her on a Friday, her face is framed by closely cropped bangs and long tresses that hang to her chin. On Saturday she looks altogether different, with hair pulled tight against her scalp into a ponytail just an inch long. By Sunday she might well wear glamorous locks cascading down her back. The secret of Brown’s chameleon powers: remy hair from factories like Raj Impex.

It’s “a necessary accessory, like earrings or a necklace,” she says. “It lets me be whoever I want to be for a day.” Her clients feel the same way; they spend about $400 a month maintaining their extensions, she says, though a few drop thousands. Between shops like hers and celebs who might shell out $10,000 or more for a single wig or weave, there is a near-constant demand for Indian locks. “If you want cheap hair,” sniffs a supplier’s blog called thelookhairandmakeup.com, “you’re going to get a cheap-looking hairstyle.”

“The only hair worth buying is remy,” says one of Brown’s clients, her hair wrapped around enormous curlers. “They say that it’s cut from the heads of virgins.” Though not strictly true, the hair woven onto her head went from being an act of humility and altruism in the name of God, to one of America’s most recognizable glamour enhancers.

The original caption for this photo read, “Material for anatomy studies is plentiful at a cemetery where many old bones have been unearthed. Student is Loretta Hardesty of Butte, Montana.” The image ran in the January 4, 1947, issue of
Life
magazine.
(Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Guzman)

T
OWARD THE END
of 1946 a twenty-something woman in an ankle-length skirt and a white shirt embroidered with brightly colored flowers painted on a canvas and easel in a cemetery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Dilapidated wooden crosses, now little more than rotten planks, jutted out of the loose dirt at odd angles, and piles of discarded bones lay on the ground. Femurs, ribs, and skulls without teeth poked out of the loose soil and mixed together pell-mell so that it was impossible to tell which bones belonged to which bodies. Two young boys watched the woman spread charcoal onto a canvas as she sketched the gruesome scene. Originally from Butte, Montana, Loretta Hardesty traveled south of the American border to study art at the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes.

A few feet away a German-born photographer who had fled persecution back home and Mexicanized his name to Juan Guzman focused his lens on the scene and shot a series of pictures. One of them ran in the January 4, 1947, issue of
Life
magazine.

The article was such a smashing success that the school, which at the time had only fifty American students, received more than six thousand applications for the next year. The piece appealed to a new generation of American GIs who thought that living cheaply and painting skulls and nudes in Mexico would be a lot more pleasant than scraping a living together back home. It was the first time ever that the school had to turn away applications.

The art school needed at least two types of bodies. It needed living students who could pay first-world money for tuition, and the dead bodies of locals who unwittingly provided raw materials for anatomical sketching. The photo in
Life
is striking not because it depicts a horrible crime, but rather because of the juxtaposition of a pretty young woman in a field of scattered bones. For an art student, it didn’t matter how the bones left their grave, only that they were good subjects for anatomical studies. The image is a microcosm of every red market that ever existed. Both Guzman and Hardesty are passive observers of a supply chain that begins with human tragedy.

When I look at the photo I wonder what Mohammed Mullah Box, the cemetery caretaker I met outside of Kolkata, would think if he saw it. Every night he checks his village’s graveyard and wonders if it will be safe for him to leave the bodies unguarded, or if he should spend the night awake listening for the sound of shovels. He knows that it is only a matter of time until they strike again, and that there is little he can do with his bamboo cane to stop them. For the villagers of Harbati, there is nothing neutral about grave robbery.

After almost four years studying the breadth of red markets, I am no longer shocked by the gory details of an autopsy or the depth to which a criminal will sink to harvest human materials. Rather, I am only surprised at how normal it is to simply shrug our shoulders and take the supply chain for granted.

For the most part we are comfortable with the idea of buying bodies and body parts as long as we don’t really know where they come from. Ideally we would buy human kidneys like we would any other meat in the grocery store: wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam with no hint of the slaughterhouse. At some level we all know that it took a sacrifice to bring a human body to the market, but we just don’t want too many details.

Most of us know someone whose life has been saved by an emergency blood transfusion, or a family who has adopted a child from a foreign country. We have probably met people who have benefited from fertility treatments, or who have had their lives extended by an organ transplant. We certainly know doctors who have studied anatomy on real human skeletons; and we have taken drugs that were first tested on human guinea pigs.

It is not bad that these things exist. Some of the most important advances in science have only been made possible precisely because we have treated people as things. Who we are as people depends a lot on who we are as meat. And for the most part we do okay managing the difficult terrain between our physical selves and the part of us that, for lack of a better concept, has a soul.

Criminal and unethical red markets are far smaller than their legitimate counterparts. According to the World Health Organization, about 10 percent of world organ transplants are obtained on the black market. As a rule of thumb, that figure seems to apply to just about every other market for human bodies as well.

The stakes are high. Who we are as a society depends on how we address that remaining 10 percent. Do we let blood brokers and child kidnappers ply their trade and write off the human fallout as just another cost of doing business? The prevalence of kidney brokers in the third world and exploited Eastern European egg sellers in the former Soviet bloc has as much to do with global economic inequalities as it does with the way we manage red markets. Is it even possible to set up a system that minimizes damage across all red markets?

Reducing the number of criminals is not only a legal problem; the solution must come from a fundamental reevaluation of our long-held beliefs on the sanctity of the human body, economics, altruism, and privacy. We need to stop viewing the demand for bodies and human tissue as a fixed issue that can only be answered by increasing the overall supply. Instead, the demand for organs, hair, children, and bones is first and foremost a function of overall (and perceived) supply. If bones are freely available in Asia, someone will find a way to make use of them. If more kidneys enter into the market, doctors will deem more people eligible for kidney transplants. The more adoption agencies advertise overcrowded orphanages, the more people will come forward to take the children into their homes. And the more eggs available on the open market, the more people will fly to other countries to receive them.

Demand on its own is meaningless. Just because there is high demand for hot rod cars, atomic bombs, first-edition
Spiderman
comics, and Rolex watches does not mean that we can or should ramp up production across the board. Without supply, that demand carries no weight.

Take the demand for blood. While high stocks of blood in the first half of the last century meant surgeons could develop vastly improved surgical techniques, certain religious groups—most notably Christian Scientists—were opposed to any sort of blood transfusion. Over the years the complete lack of demand for human blood among these people led to private investment and eventually to great strides forward in the field of bloodless surgeries. At first doctors wasted blood in order to gain more surgical sophistication; however, when they could not extend the benefits of routine procedures to everyone, the prohibition of blood use created a boom in technologies that reduced blood loss during surgeries across the board.

Today, in hospitals in the United States and Europe with access to advanced technologies, many types of operating room procedures use little or no blood at all. Though the science has a ways to go, one day the same could be true in the case of artificial organs that could make living transplants irrelevant.

Even more important, it is impossible to build an economic system that depends on altruism as a source of raw materials. In an ideal world no one would buy or sell another human being—all exchanges of humanity would be based on reciprocity and goodwill to all. That world, however, is not the one we live in. Very few people give away their kidney or eggs, or risk their health in a clinical trial out of pure goodwill. While I do not believe that commercial transactions for human tissue will curtail the existence of black markets, clearly the hypocrisy of using altruism as an excuse to buy cheap raw materials does nothing to serve the greater good. The meager payments granted to the people who sell their bodies merely puts the pressure of selling flesh on people lower down on the social totem pole.

In the case of international adoption, altruism sometimes serves an even more perverse end. Instead of helping out children already stuck in orphanages, a few corrupt agencies are able to use adoption fees meant to support charity work to fund criminal enterprises.

Although it sounds good on paper and on the floor of Congress, altruism is simply not a reliable foundation for collecting and distributing human bodies. At its best it diminishes the incentive for people to supply red markets, and at its worst altruism is a convenient cover story for taking advantage of donors.

Finally, red markets will flourish as long as legal markets in bodies are not transparent. The condition for any ethical human body or tissue exchange depends on absolute transparency of the supply chain.

Even in the best hospitals in the United States, it is almost impossible to know the identity of a brain-dead donor who gave up his or her organs so that another person could live. Most adoption agencies prefer to keep the identities of the birth parents secret to protect them from uncomfortable questions down the line, and nurses and doctors routinely scrub the names of egg donors off the official paperwork. While the intentions are usually noble, it is far too easy for unethical practitioners to harvest organs from unwilling donors, kidnap children and sell them into the adoption stream, steal blood from prisoners, and coerce women into selling eggs under dangerous conditions. In every case criminals can use the guise of privacy to protect their illicit supply chains.

The depersonalization of human tissue is one of the broadest failings of modern medicine. Our goal in this century should be to integrate and repersonalize human identities into the supply chain. Every bag of blood should include the name of the original donor, every adopted child should have full access to their personal history, and every transplant recipient should know who gave an organ.

This would require a major change in the way we think about the use and reuse of human bodies. Every human has a history that needs to be told as his or her body moves through a red market. We aren’t born as neutral products that are by nature reducible to commercial barter. But undoubtedly we all are customers on a red market. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can do something about it.

And so the same standards that apply to buying used cars should also apply to buying body parts. It isn’t legal to sell stolen cars, nor is it legal to sell ones that are sure to break down. Savvy customers always get accident reports before they invest money in a used vehicle. If cars have histories, then so should bodies. Why shouldn’t parents be able to check to see if it is possible to locate the parents of the child that they adopted, or someone who bought an egg for implantation check to have access to the medical history of the donor’s family? Shouldn’t we know whose skeleton hangs in our doctor’s closet?

Transparency won’t solve every problem. Undoubtedly criminals will be able to forge paperwork, invent new backstories, and disguise unethical practices in new and imaginative ways. International boundaries and changes in legal jurisdictions make it easier for criminals to hide their tracks. However, a clear paper trail makes it easier to flag dangerous operators.

In 1946 Loretta Hardesty calmly painted the dismembered bodies of Mexican peasants without worrying much about how the bones found their way out of their graves. More than sixty years later I hope we’re able to ask the questions that she did not.