Why does (human) organ trafficking exist?
What I mean is, what do people buy organs for? Transplants? Eating? Some other fucked up purpose I didn't think of?
From what I know, buying human organs is a tad bit too expensive and risky to do just for shits and giggles.
Transplants. Supply/demand.
Exactly. Too much demand and not enough supply. People get desperate and will look for a way to buy the organ.
I figured that that seems like the most logical reason, but why do people not just get a transplant from a donor at a hospital?
The amount of people that donate organs is far lower than the need. We really ought to have an opt out system. Other people need your inside meat more than the embalmer does.
More people need a transplant than there are donors. A lot of people die waiting for an organ. Some people are willing to skip the wait list and get their organ from non willing donors.
There is a waiting list, and not all those people have the time to wait. I’m sure insurance is also a large part.
Because the waitlist is often very long. On top of a limited supply, there are other limiting factors, e.g. if you're already really old and sick, the organ that becomes available will likely go to a candidate that's more likely to have a successful transplant instead, such as a healthier kid or something.
Let’s say you’re a Cartel member, you need a transplant for you or someone you love, and you’ve acquired an amount of money that solves this through already illegal means.
Might you be inclined to not go through the ”normal” channels to obtain and perform the surgery?
"supply and demand" is a theory about price discovery. it is not an explanation for the existence of a market.
So a lot of people here don't realize that any kind of transplant outside of a waiting list is considered a trafficked organ (excluding Iran). Or how cheap it is.
I had kidney failure for many years (btw, being young doesn't help with wait times except unless maybe if you're a kid in some cases).
At some point after some years, my dad (who still has a Facebook) started asking for help for a kidney donor (for the swap program thing, basically you donate to someone else on a chain), and immediately started getting messages from people in places like the Philippines "willing" to sell their kidneys. In quotations because you never know how willing they actually are, and even if not under direct pressure, I'd say extreme poverty is still a forceful pressure.
Regardless, the prices they were asking for? Between 5-15k$.
You'd think it would cost more than a used car, but apparently not. I scolded him for even thinking about it - explained that just because you can live with 1 kidney, you're still more prone to kidney failure yourself now.
I ended up on dialysis for a little over 8 years and essentially lost my 20s to that, but at least when I finally got a transplant I didn't have to deal with any guilt (came from someone who was braindead - wear your dang bicycle helmets people).
And I'm glad I never even considered that offer - apparently I was destined to get an aggressive cancer after a kidney transplant because I'm part of a very rare estimated 5% of the world population never exposed to an extremely common virus (Epstein-Barr). That cancer would likely not have been caught by an overseas doctor who is doing shady surgeries, and I'd be dead anyways.
So maybe karma does exist (in the psychological/outcome sense at least). I got the good karma and Steve Jobs got the dumbass karma (look up the details of his liver transplant and death. I want to point out, he must've been a true asshole to not have a willing live donor for a liver transplant, as it's actually the easiest of them all to get).
There are more people needing organs then there are organs available for transplant. Which is why you will sometimes hear of a waiting list for transplants.
If you have enough money instead of going on the pleb list you buy an organ from someone and you don't ask how they got the organ.
Organ transplant.
There’s a board who decides which patients qualify for the list. If you are someone who sat in a chair gaming, from teens to 30s, pickling your liver with alcohol for the duration, thus killing it, you won’t make that waiting list. Two reasons. You can’t be trusted to care for the new liver. You’re not a useful member of society.
Organ transplants happen when someone young and healthy dies, is in a position that those organs can be preserved, and the family, in the midst of their horror, shock, and grief, both allows the conversation and then agrees to the donation.
As such, if that sit in a chair gaming and pickling themself individual has a billionaire dad, maybe they go black market? Otherwise it’s hospice care.
As a person who has had a double lung transplant, being “useful to society” isn’t one of the dozens of criteria you must have
Also old people can give organs and tissues, my lungs are 21 years older than I am and my donor was 51 when she died.
Medically, 51 isn’t old.
Who gets to decide if you are useful to society or not? That sounds like such a bull shit reason.
Not me. That’s is above my pay grade.
The main point is someone has to decide.
Well, they ain't harvesting organs for no poor folk and rich people don't like to die
To keep Keith Richards alive.
I kind of wonder this sometimes too. Maybe not from an organ harvesting standpoint but enslavement. If I were captured/kidnapped and became a sex slave or a scam call center slave or something, my #1 goal would be to escape and if that's not possible, go on a violent rampage and murder as many of my abusers as possible before they kill me (they'd just kill me when I outlive my usefulness regardless) and if that's not possible, the s-word, as a last resort. Does this type of thing happen more often than they make it sound? Perhaps they are really efficient at going after the families of victims that don't fully submit which keeps victims in check? Maybe victims are kept in holocaust-like conditions so they aren't physically capable of anything in the first place, but then they wouldn't be capable of work, so idk.
Human trafficking disturbs me enough that I try not to think about it.
Rich people sometimes have bad organs and need transplants. They're willing to pay a lot for a new one so they don't have to wait in line with the plebs. Organ trafficking is how they achieve this.
When you have black market organ money, the doctors come to you.
No, the reseller installs the organ for you. When you're that rich everything you buy comes with white glove installation included.
No that'll get you arrested. You can just buy the supplies at home depot and watch a YouTube tutorial