Part One: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

Robert and Ben Bowlin sit-down to talk about controversial blood plasma donation program in the Arkansas Prison system under Governor Clinton that killed more than 2 9/11s worth of Canadians. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Oh my God, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where me and my guest for this week, the great Ben Bowlin, are about to get targeted and murdered by the Clinton crime family. Ben, how are you doing today?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Finally, you know what I mean?

• 0:21Robert Evans?

  Finally, yes.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  We've been, we've been

• 0:24Robert Evans?

  Living the dream, dying the dream, yes.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Here we go. Yeah, it's great to, uh, it's great to be back. It's great to hang out with you. I was thinking of you and the team recently because I don't know whether you recall, Robert, but lo, these many years ago, when you were just beginning a podcast called Behind the Bastards, you graced us with, with an appearance, a cameo, dropped a hot 16 on a show we do called Ridiculous History.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Do you remember that?

• 0:55Robert Evans?

  I do remember that, yes, about the, the governor of, uh, or the founder, the fat, one of the founders of Oregon, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  You're right, yes. How Oregon originated as a supremacist paradise, yeah.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Well, today, we're not talking about that, although we are talking about something where racism is involved. We're talking about, I wasn't entirely joking about the Clintons. They are, they are intricately involved in this story, or at least Bill is. But Ben, what do you know about the blood industry?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Do you mean like?

• 1:29Robert Evans?

  Ben Bowlin, host of Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History and a bunch of other stuff.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  All right, all right.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  You mentioned one of them, yes.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Like as a fan or just the industry overall?

• 1:40Robert Evans?

  Are you, so you are a fan of blood? You're a big blood guy?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what people say about me, yeah.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, who doesn't? I enjoy having roughly five liters of blood in my body.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  That's what everybody says about you, Ben.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  Every, every time I'm in or adjacent to a shooting, I think, boy, it's great having all of my blood still inside of me.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I also love, you know, like any other, any other damn peer, I am a huge supporter of blood donations.

• 2:09Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, huge supporter, yes.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  And that's what we're kind of talking about today because there's some, there's some prob- donating blood, there's this great story that's going around because the, the fellow just died of this, this lovely elderly Australian man who found out that he had a rare blood factor that was crucial in making a medicine that millions of babies needed to live. So he just donated blood for like decades. Saving like two and a half million babies. That's great. Donating blood. Great. Blood as a commodity is what we're talking about here. And there's some deeply problematic aspects of it. And I wanted to start by saying, where do you think blood lies on the list of US exports by value?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Ooh, by value, not by, not by liquid weight. Okay.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, blood and blood products. How, how, how much a chunk of the US economy do you think that would be?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Clever, clever question, Robert, because that would factor in things like plasma.

• 3:12Robert Evans?

  Right, yes, of course.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so with that, I would, gosh, it's a difficult question. Uh, it's a difficult question. I don't know the answer.

• 3:24Robert Evans?

  It is the ninth largest export for the entire United States.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 3:29Robert Evans?

  Yes. Uh, it beats, it beats like coal.

• 3:33Robert Evans?

  Blood is a massive industry in the United States. Um, it is, it is like, again, it's one of our largest exports. Uh, blood products make up 1.8% of all US exports, which is up about half a percent from where it was 10 years ago. And blood exports are valued at about $37 billion.

• 3:56Robert Evans?

  Like, it's, it's, it's much larger. I, I did not realize when I started how big a, like, that's a significant piece of the economy.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  That's top 10.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. And here's the thing, that's like shocking when you just like, I never would have thought of, when I, when I, if I had been asked to like guess the 10 largest exports, blood wouldn't have been on my list. But here's the thing, the United States provides 70% of the blood plasma used worldwide to make medicine.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  The plasma?

• 4:28Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. 70% of all blood plasma used on the planet in medicine comes from here.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  We are the largest exporter of blood products of on the planet and no one else comes very close.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Go USA.

• 4:45Robert Evans?

  To an extent, yes. And this is one of those things where we're talking about how messed up a lot of this industry is, it's not like some messed up industries where it's like, well, maybe we don't all need this product that the US puts out, or maybe there's alternatives to this product that has harmful consequences. Everyone real, we do really need a lot of blood and blood products. It's very important for medicine. A crucial part of keeping people alive. So you can't deny, there's, it's not like, there's no argument to be made that like, we don't need to be producing all of this blood. Somebody fucking has to. The problem is that whenever you've got an industry this big, you're going to find people try to find ways to maximize their profits and minimize their costs.

• 5:30Robert Evans?

  And when you're talking about blood, that's gonna lead you to do some fucked up shit that has some hideous consequences, right?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:38Robert Evans?

  And that's, that's the story that we're telling today. This week's episode is going to explain why and how a huge chunk of the global blood economy came to rely specifically on a bunch of prison inmates in Arkansas, watched over by a handful of Clinton associates who saw their job as basically a bribe for political loyalty, and how this ultimately killed multiple nine elevens worth of Canadians, English people, and other folks around the planet. This is a dark story and it all, it's all set in the Arkansas prison system. And it all starts with this immutable fact, which is that human beings die without blood. The average adult has about four to five liters of whole blood in their body at any point in time.

• 6:20Robert Evans?

  And while we've always known that like, you need blood, medical science has tended to focus throughout most of history on like, maybe people have too much blood, maybe they have bad blood, and you gotta like, add in good blood to replace losses. It was a, a messy process of figuring out like, how blood works and.

• 6:40Robert Evans?

  The first blood transfusion, as far as we know, was attempted in 1628 by an English physician. And I say attempted because it did not work. And I don't think that's a, like, it was a messy process, you know, trying to figure out how to do this. And they weren't always using human blood, right? Because if you're like a, an early doctor in this period, it might not make, the logical thing wouldn't be that like, well, obviously a lamb's blood and a human's blood are fundamentally different and we shouldn't be putting lamb's blood into people. You might not make that jump, right?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  It's just, it all just looks like blood to me, you know?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  Just like if you put like, blood from somebody and somebody who cannot take a donation from them. If you're dealing with 1600, you don't know about blood types? How would, how would you? How would that possibly be, come to you?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. You should already get bonus points for recognizing the blood exists.

• 7:34Robert Evans?

  Right. If you're aware that the problem is not too much blood, you're doing very well in the 1600s. You're, you're a great doctor in the 1600s. If your immediate jump isn't just like, well, let's cut him and drain a bunch of that shit out.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  This guy with a sword wound probably has too much blood left in him.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the problem. It's like, not only do you have too much blood, but your humors are off, dog. You know what I mean? That's why.

• 8:04Robert Evans?

  The balance is wrong. You have to think about it like, if we took a bunch of computers back to like 900 B.C. And we showed them how to use the computers, but didn't explain anything about like how they worked? People would probably be able to keep some of those things going for a while. But their theories about why different stuff worked would be wild.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Right, like, we have to, we have to sacrifice a certain amount of people.

• 8:31Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. The computers demand blood.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes if the computer doesn't work, it's because there's too much blood.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Yes, there would be a whole religion centered around getting like Microsoft Outlook to work. And honestly, they might, they might do a better job than we do because Microsoft Outlook never works well. I mean, maybe human sacrifice is the answer, Ben.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, maybe we should look out for the Outlook religion.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. You know what? I'm gonna get on that one. Uh, I'm gonna need, I've been meaning to have like a sacrificial knife made for me. So this, this could, this could in well for everybody.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  You don't, you don't have that?

• 9:10Robert Evans?

  Uh huh. I have a sacrificial knife, but it's not nice enough to fix Microsoft Outlook, Sophie.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Or, or do you just have a knife that has occasionally been used for sacrifice?

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, yeah, actually this one, right?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Folks, uh, folks, Robert just did, uh, pull it up and, uh, while you know, it is to his right. It is to his right.

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  Keep it near me. You never know. You know my motto, ABS baby, always be sacrificing. You, you, you never, you never know when which god, you know, Babylonian deities, there's all sorts of gods out there that need blood. You know?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  When I, when I, when I'm more recovered from surgery and I'm back to filming, I gotta show everyone that knife you got me as a surgery present.

• 9:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, the Bowie. Yeah, yeah, it's a nice one. Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Ooh, I like the tease.

• 9:59Robert Evans?

  It's a Sforbontempski Bowie.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  It's a really nice knife.

• 10:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 10:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Kiwis in the audience will be impressed.

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• 10:13Robert Evans?

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• 11:15Robert Evans?

  So, we didn't get blood transfusion right the first time.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Not for a bit.

• 11:21Robert Evans?

  Not for a bit, but by 1655, a physician named Richard Lower had carried out the first successful blood transfusion, not in humans, but on dogs. He is one of these like rare, much better than that, where he's like, "Maybe we should just start by trying to replace people's blood. I'm gonna, I'm gonna work with dogs. See if I can get that down." You know? And two years later, a French physician and Richard Lower separately carried out successful blood transfusions from lambs to human beings. And I, I know I just mentioned that that like, isn't a great idea, and it's not, but it does sort of work sometimes. And it's the kind of thing you will occasionally hear, you know,

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  "You can use coconut water for blood transfusions because it's like sterile and the electrolyte content." It's one of those things, if you look up, like Snopes will say, "No, this isn't true." I found a scientific study where they did this. They used it for an emergency transfusion. What, what's going on here, when, when using lambs or coconuts does work, it's not because, again, these are good replacements for blood. It's because sometimes when people lose enough blood, the biggest thing is getting enough like mass of something that's close enough in there so that their body keeps working. There are, like, if you, if you use coconut water for transfusions, because of like, I think the amount of potassium is one problem.

• 12:43Robert Evans?

  There are horrible additional health conflicts it can cause, and the same is true of lamb's blood. But if someone is like, going to immediately die because they don't have enough blood, sometimes this has been Done in order to save them, right?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Robert Evans?

  But it's not a good idea if there's other options. And in fact, once they started using lamb's blood, it became very quickly clear that like people also die because of the consequences of shooting them full of lamb's blood.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's also like, you know, a modern comparison, Robert, might be the idea of heart transplants, right? With non-human organs.

• 13:19Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Not to get too far ahead, but like that's, that's, that's, that's a situation where a current human technology can sort of Band-Aid you. You might make it, you know, a year or so. It's not a, it's not a actual fax human heart. Just like, it reminds me of, and I don't, I don't know enough to speak off expertise here, but it reminds me of like that old trick with, with elderly cars. I'll call them vintage cars.

• 13:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Where if the radiator is fucking up, you can put, you can put a couple of things in to just keep the radiator going until you get to the gas station. So maybe the lamb's blood thing is like that.

• 14:03Robert Evans?

  It is a little, and it's, it's also this thing in like emergency medicine where like, there's certain things you're never supposed to do, like use an AED on an infant, that also like people do because in the instance in which you would be doing it, the infant is dead, so you can't make it worse, right? And like, when we're talking about like where the origin of this, of the coconut water thing is it was at least one of the stories you'll hear is that it was like during like World War II and like they had, they didn't have enough blood and they just kind of tried something. And so like occasionally, stuff that's not blood or not human blood can be used in a way that will deal with the immediate problem. But again, always causes a bunch of additional problems

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  because it's not supposed to be in there, right?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Right, right. Quick question though, quick question.

• 14:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  What, Robert, if you're imagining it and Sophie as well, this World War II doctor who stumbled upon coconut water, Band-Aiding blood or the circulatory.

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  If that's how it happened, it is a little unclear, but yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  If that is how it happened. What, what do you imagine? Like if their hand is going over a table with all sorts of other shit on it, what else did they look at first? What do you think?

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, given the state of things at the time, straight liquor. What if, what if we just put some Jim Bean in there? Will that save their lives?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And they're like, no, we're saving the, we're saving the liquor for the guys who aren't bleeding out.

• 15:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we, we need all of that Jim Bean. We are fighting, we are island hopping, fighting the empire of Japan. Nobody wants to sleep sober at night. Give him some coconut water or some shit.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, I don't know. So the first human to human blood transfusion occurs in Philadelphia, 1795. Although the doctor who does it doesn't publish. And so the first successful, uh, transfusion is like generally listed as 1818. It was by a British doctor treating a postpartum hemorrhage. Uh, and the science kind of develops from there. One of the things that becomes clear is that in a lot of instances, when people need a transfusion, they don't need whole blood. Right? Initially, they're starting out with whole blood and people find out over decades and stuff that actually you can take different elements of blood and, and kind of add in a substitute, an exaline is usually used and, and do infusions of that for certain problems.

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  Milk is actually one of the infusion substitutes, but this is again horrible for people. Don't shoot milk into people. Milk does not belong in your blood.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Sounds like big dairy to me, bro.

• 16:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm sure the fucking dairy companies were like fighting, fighting like hell to have that be the case. So.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  It's what for.

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  It's, it's what's in your blood.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So over the next decades, we figure out shit like blood types and we start messing around a lot with plasma, which is a component of blood that can be used to make a whole bunch of different medications that will save your life. One of the best known uses of blood plasma is the manufacture of clotting agents, uh, in order to save and improve the lives of hemophiliacs. These are people who like, if they start bleeding, they just kind of keep bleeding. Their blood doesn't have the thing that is like, all right, we've blood enough. Time to scab, you know?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  All gas, no brakes.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  All gas, no brakes with the bleeding. And the first of these medications, uh, hits in like the 1960s. And they more than double the life expectancy of hemophiliacs. As far as like single medical interventions go, this is like. One of the big ones in terms of stopping like improving quality of life and length of life. Obviously, I'm not an M D or a scientist, but here's how an article in the William and Mary Business Law Review by Sophia Chase describes the process of making this life-saving medication using plasma. After blood is collected, it is spun off through plasmapheresis and its component parts are used for different purposes. The plasma of thousands of donors is pooled together to create factor concentrates that

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  form a blood product known as factor VIII, used to medicate hemophiliacs. Depending on the severity of the disease, a hemophiliac might need to use factor VIII seven times or several times a week. This means essentially that people who are already ill with a life-threatening disease and a compromised immune system have no alternative but to inject themselves with plasma hundreds of times a year. There's a degree to which this is a little like a diabetic who needs insulin, right? This is a medication that you need constantly, right? In order to not die. That said, you know, the fact that this is available is great, but without blood transfusions and all of the medicines, it's one of those things where like because we developed this,

• 18:52Robert Evans?

  there's a shitload of people you know who are alive today, whether it's because they bled out because they were a soldier who got shot or like a random person who was in like a car accident or got shot, or whether there's somebody with hemophilia or one of a number of diseases and disorders. Or one of their parents. Or one of their parents. You know, people who are alive because of this branch of science, right? It's incredibly important stuff that we figured out largely. The problem is that while I don't think a single doctor would argue that access to blood and blood products is a cornerstone of modern medicine, there is never enough of the shit. Absolutely never. At no point have we ever had a sufficient supply of blood and blood products.

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And capitalism being what it is, the market has responded by making blood and blood products wildly valuable. In 1998, a barrel of crude oil was worth about $13. A similar quantity of human Blood was worth $20,000. But that's whole blood. If you took that drawn blood that as whole blood is worth about 20 grand for a barrel and separated it into plasma and the other different blood products that are used in medicine, you could get more like $67,000 in $1998 off of that barrel.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Oh, like if you if you steal a Honda Civic, you make more money selling parts of the Civic.

• 20:13Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. But you know, Ben, that that gets into our very successful business, taking catalytic converters. Which by the way, folks, if you need rare earth minerals, Ben and I are selling them wholesale. You just get a sack of cats delivered to your door, you know?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Which is the new up and coming, we call it kiddo currency. It is Evans and Bolins.

• 20:38Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Sophie Ray production. We're a limited liability company, so don't try to come at us. Don't even try.

• 20:46Robert Evans?

  What, once the dollar crashes and once crypto crashes, the only currency is going to be catalytic converters. You'll be walking around with a wallet full of them. And you know what? We're all going to get very strong because they are not light.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  They are not light. This is going to be great for our rats.

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  You need to start doing the holes thing and carrying like a baby cow up a mountain now or a pig or whatever it was in that book. So that you can be strong enough to bring grocery money with you.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  You know, what's what's amazing about this is somebody, one of us is listening right now and has is doing the fireman carry with a goat. And they're like, I'm fucking ahead of the game.

• 21:25Robert Evans?

  I'm ready. Several other people are listening on their earbuds as they saw someone's cat from the bottom of a Prius.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Robert Evans?

  So anyway, I bring that up just to say that like, there's a lot of money in this. And wherever there's a lot of money in the raw amount of blood, there will be an incentive for people to do unethical things to get that blood because there's never just enough donations. Now, there's some reasons for that, some of which is the problem of the different organizations responsible for drawing blood. We could talk about the fact that queer people are still generally forbidden in many cases from donating blood because of the AIDS scare, or the AIDS epidemic. We could talk, you know, there's a number of critiques, but even if you were to solve for those problems, there's still never going to be enough of this stuff. I don't know how we fix it until we can start like just growing, you know, functional blood in a lab, which is

• 22:17Robert Evans?

  a thing people are trying to figure out. But from the beginning, the main problem with blood for transfusions in medicine has been that you can only really get it, I know there's those crabs that we can use for some things, but as a general rule, you only get it from people. And people are very attached to their blood. And they're not always able to donate. There's a cost, as in, it's not that bad, right, donating, if you donate, I've donated, I'm sure you have. It's not like horrible, but like, it's not nothing donating, like, it has a, you were aware that you gave up some of your very important blood afterwards.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the orange juice and the crackers don't quite get you back to 100%. I think it was something like, pre-pandemic, I want to say, still a very small amount of people in the US donated blood.

• 23:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, and it's, it's great to donate, but there's also another problem with, that has nothing to do with this, which is that people, the kind of people who you need to donate blood, have bloodborne illnesses sometimes. And often they're aware of it, but often they aren't. And bloodborne illnesses travel extremely easily through donated blood products. Remember what I said, when you are making factor VIII to give to hemophiliacs, you are taking thousands of people's blood plasma and mixing it together.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Group project.

• 23:35Robert Evans?

  It's a group project. And if, say there's, I'm throwing a number out of my ass here, we'll get, we'll get more exact, but say there's 20,000 different people's plasma comes into making a batch of factor VIII. If one of those people has a bloodborne illness, that whole batch can get tainted. It just takes one. That doesn't mean everyone who gets medicated from it, but it means that anyone could potentially, right? It's kind of the same with like fentanyl. You've got like a shitload of like, you know, whatever powdered drug and a little bit of fentanyl gets in there. Everyone who does that drug might not get enough for it to matter, but someone could get a hot dose and then they're dead, right? That's kind of how tainted blood works.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:17Robert Evans?

  And so this is a problem in part because again, there's not enough blood. So if one person gets through because they weren't screened properly, you can ruin a bunch of that incredibly precious blood. And it was an even bigger problem back before where our methods of testing for shit like hepatitis were as good as they are because you didn't know what the fuck was getting into the blood supply, right? Um, and so the odds of recipients getting sick from infected blood in the past was a lot higher. And the other issue here is that whole blood donations, if those are tainted, are still less likely to get you sick than blood product donations. So plasma that is tainted is likelier to get you sick than whole blood that's tainted.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 25:02Robert Evans?

  Um, I don't know why, but that's the way it works. Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Okay. So it's like a, maybe a concentration of those vectors, something like that.

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  The further I say this, the dumber I'll sound.

• 25:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I don't know why, but this is what, this is what the medical paperwork says is that blood products that, that you, when those are used on you, it is, if they're tainted, they're likely to spread disease than whole blood.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  And this exists in a profit-seeking environment.

• 25:31Robert Evans?

  And this exists in a profit where there's a fuckload of billions on the table. Um, now you're probably aware of how HIV would really cause some problems for the blood donation industry, right? Because first off, they didn't initially know it was a thing. So no one was checking for this stuff during the early days when it was spreading. Um, and in that initial outbreak, a bunch of hemophiliacs caught HIV, uh, through their transfusions and got sick and died. Um, but before and during HIV, those... It was still never the most common illness spread through blood donations. The most common illnesses spread through blood and blood, you know, product donations are hepatitis A, B, and C.

• 26:14Robert Evans?

  And we have aware, been aware that hepatitis was a danger for this kind of stuff for a long time. But hepatitis C, we couldn't detect it until 1998. And we couldn't detect in like people and we couldn't detect it in blood products until 1992. So like, we've only very recently been able to actually like monitor people's blood to see if they had it. And even more recently than that, be able to check blood products to see if they were clean from it. So what you got, if we're talking about like the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, is a supply of something crucial that is inherently limited. And, you know, part of the issue here is that when we're talking about the international blood trade, if you have a, if you've got a country with endemic hepatitis, right, of some sort.

• 26:56Robert Evans?

  They're going to need to bring in blood from other countries because their ability to get enough clean blood on their own before you can test for all of this stuff property is going to be effectively nil. And they're going to need, as a general rule, our blood, right? And because people don't like giving blood, you're gonna have to pay donors. And because corporations like to maximize profits, they want to pay as little as possible. And I think we're starting to see where the problems come in here, right? Now, the first wave of blood products hits the United States in the 60s. And oversight and regulation of the blood industry is basically nonexistent at this point. Many, if not most, paid donors are IV drug users, the homeless, and prisoners.

• 27:41Robert Evans?

  All groups of people with a much higher rate of bloodborne illnesses than the general population or the volunteer donor population. Because the need is inelastic, different states start experimenting with blood shield laws, which exempt blood suppliers from what is called strict liability. As Sophia Chase explains, "This meant that, despite providing an incredibly risky product, the business did not need to worry about the possibility of many expensive lawsuits. The large donor population, the lax supervision, and the diminished threat of litigation resulted in the United States becoming the premier producer of blood and plasma products." So we become the largest world producer of blood and plasma, in part because we're like, hey, if somebody gets sick

• 28:22Robert Evans?

  because you didn't do your due diligence to make sure this stuff's safe, that ain't on you. We need the blood this badly. Get it, however, you know?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like our, uh... Like our ongoing, quite successful bag of catalytic converters business.

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Limited liability.

• 28:38Robert Evans?

  Limited liability, because yeah, exactly. You know, why would we be liable for what happens to people's cars? They're not our cars. Speaking of cars.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Robert Evans?

  You know, what you should buy is if a car is advertised next, that. Otherwise, whatever else.

• 28:57Speaker 04

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• 29:26Robert Evans?

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• 30:25Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 30:36Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, um, in the late 1960s, a researcher named Richard Titmus concluded that paying donors made people likelier to lie about their medical history, right? From the beginning, because there's not enough volunteers, you are paying for most of this stuff. And research shows that like, people will pretend they don't have the risk factors, or just lie about outright having a bloodborne illness because they're desperate for money, right? Because people need money to live. He wrote that ultimately, quote, "This paid donations results in situations in which proportionally more and more blood is supplied by the poor, the unskilled, the unemployed, and other

• 31:17Robert Evans?

  low-income groups and categories of exploited human populations of high blood yielders. Redistribution of blood and blood products from the poor to the rich appears to be one of the dominant effects of the American blood banking systems." So not only is this our ninth largest export, tens of billions of dollars, it is an industry where the blood comes from poor people, and an overwhelming amount of it goes to people who are more affluent, because obviously they're able to pay for better medical care. We are mining, this is a vampiric system, where the poor are having their blood taken, and given often to people who are more affluent to them, right? That's a big part of the blood industry, especially in this period.

• 31:58Robert Evans?

  And another big part of it is that because those exploited people desperately need the money, they may not tell you if they just shot up heroin, right?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Right. Or if, or if someone had previously donated to one institution.

• 32:14Robert Evans?

  Right. Yes, yes. And there's a lot of, in these companies, well, we'll just, we'll just destroy some records, or whatever, right? Now, following the advice that Titmus gave, because he's, again, like, this is a really deeply problematic system, and maybe we shouldn't be paying for blood donations because it inherently causes problems. If this advice had been followed, it would have destroyed the blood plasma industry in particular. So they just ignored it.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  The blood money industry?

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  Right, the blood money. Yes, yes. So they don't, they just ignore what this guy says. And in fact, they do worse than ignore him, they continue to explore more and more exploited segments of the populace to buy blood from. Of course, homeless people, street-level sex workers, people who are using IV drugs, those are all, those are all people who are desperate for cash, and will do anything to get it. But you know what group of people are hardest up? The incarcerated.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Ah, the people who are loophole enslaved in this country?

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. And, you know, there are several things, including the 13th Amendment, as you stated, that make incarcerated people the ideal source of raw blood for America's blood merchants. The US has by this point designated blood a vital resource, which means the government has streamlined regulations to ensure a sufficient supply. This meant that if you set up a plasma donation center, a collection point in a prison, there is no mandated oversight, right? The FDA is basically not involving themselves, right? Or at least not initially. Which means that, and as long as this stays a scarce product, drug companies are allowed to buy their blood from, quote, "unlicensed, uninspected vendors."

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  In other words, the drug companies who are buying, because it's not the drug companies making these collection points, it's other companies. And because this is so scarce, if you're buying blood, you don't have to like, say, "And I got it from these people who have a license to get blood and proving that they follow all these..." You can just buy it from whomever. Guy comes to your door with a sack of blood, you can just purchase that.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  The days of stray blood are over.

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  That was the, that's what we're aspiring toward.

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  I hate that we have to, we have to bring this up. Another thing going into this, if we are counting something, we being human civilization, as a vital resource.

• 34:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Such that we're gonna cut some corners.

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Corners to get enough of it, sure.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, due diligence, then we're also going to, oh, we already did it, we already cut the corners on liability or responsibility. I don't know, man, I just, I, I, Robert, you know, I'm a fan of the show, I don't want to spoil it, but it doesn't sound like this ends well. I thought maybe this would be the one happy episode.

• 35:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, I will say, the system doesn't work in this way in every extent now. Like, there's still a lot of issues with the blood system, but a lot... Like, things do get better as a result of all of the people who are going to die, right? I'm talking about the way it was in like the seventies and stuff here. Now, that said, it's still, there's a lot of issues and also a lot of problems with like, the way in which blood donation is conducted. I'm not saying that there's not, but this is when it, we're talking about this, this program at its worst.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because these people have, the incarcerated in the, in the US penal system have very little recourse towards, toward any alternative, right? These are the day, these are also the days of benighted experiments on human beings.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  Yes, and all of that is going down and the, the fact that like in terms of the companies who need blood, they're looking at prison pop, this is the ideal donor base because number one, the prison population is fairly stable. A lot of these guys are in there for years or decades, you can rely on them. And the need, the prisoners' need for cash is also stable. This makes for an extremely predictable flow of product and businesses thrive when things are predictable. From the early days of experimentation in this field, there had been data that doing this was dangerous. In 1969, the New York Times published a story about several deaths tied to prison-derived plasma products. In 1970, they followed it up with an article describing prison plasma donation as transfusion roulette.

• 36:35Robert Evans?

  In 1970, after, 74, after several more well-publicized blood disasters, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare published our first national blood policy. It recommended that only volunteers be allowed to give blood because again, there's so many problems with paying people. In 1982, the FDA made a non-binding request that blood donated by prison inmates not be purchased or sold for domestic consumption. So in 1982, the FDA is like, we shouldn't use domestically any of the blood that we pay inmates for. Now crucially, they're not saying, don't pay inmates for blood, they're saying, don't use it here.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Right, right. And, and further, come on, let's, let's spend a little time just scratching behind the ears of statements like non-binding.

• 37:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Come on, pinky swear me, you guys, like, let's pinky swear. Just not here, right?

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Just somewhere else, like our-

• 37:30Robert Evans?

  Somewhere else, so it's not our problem.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  The earlier laws regarding, uh, US-produced propaganda.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  For instance, right?

• 37:37Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Uh, jeez, well, this-

• 37:39Robert Evans?

  Just don't do it here.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Don't do it here. Don't, you know, it's like, uh, it's like the shitty stepdad-

• 37:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  About smoking cigarettes.

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Just don't do it without, you know, I can see it.

• 37:50Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I don't want to tell your mama smelled it.

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, the FDA is, is definitely in its shitty stepdad era here. So, the industry doesn't stop taking incarcerated people's blood. And in fact, the FDA keeps issuing licenses to export blood to prisma-plasma- prison plasma centers in several states. These included Nevada, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arizona, Missouri, and the focus of our episodes this week, Arkansas. In 1970, an Arkansas district court had ruled that several practices at Cummins Prison in Grady, Arkansas, were cruel and unusual violations of the Eighth and Fourteen Amendments. One 1969 description of conditions in Cummins said this: "Many of the inmates are psychopathic and sociopathic.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  Some of them," again, this is, uh, 1969, "some of them are aggressive homosexuals. Many of the inmates are hardened criminals, and some of them are extremely dangerous to society in general, to their keepers, and to fellow inmates. Many of them are malingerers and will go to any lengths to avoid work. Many are prone to destroy state property, even items designed for their welfare and comforts." This is how they're writing about these people, who are going to become the core of this blood donation system for one very good reason, which is that Arkansas prisons don't allow inmates to work for money.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 39:10Robert Evans?

  So, the blood donation program is going to become the only way Arkansas prison inmates can get cash.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.

• 39:21Robert Evans?

  Right. In 1978, the US Supreme Court had found that Arkansas's solitary confinement tradition was unconstitutional. Justice John Paul Stevens described the prison system in Arkansas as, quote, "a dark and evil world." And another federal judge described the people who ran Arkansas's prison system as "evil men." These are federal judges. One of the Supreme Court justices looking at it and be like, "Wow, this is like Mordor. This is fucked."

• 39:50Robert Evans?

  I'm a federal judge in the 60s and this is bad, you know?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you guys.

• 39:54Robert Evans?

  Or 70s.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Well, still, I, as someone in that level of, uh, the judiciary at that time, they probably, they probably got their own, you know, crimes.

• 40:06Robert Evans?

  They've seen some shit. Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. They got that seven league stare, you know what I mean?

• 40:12Robert Evans?

  When you see a federal judge using a language that you would expect from like some 19-year-old like anarchist protester at like an anti-prison rally, like, the conditions must be nightmarish, right? John Paul Stevens is calling the people running this system evil. Like, cannot, cannot exaggerate how bad it is. It's like when you hear the SS punished a guy for committing war crimes. It's like, oh my God. Wow.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  It's too far.

• 40:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. What did you do?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  It's like, uh, it's like here in Atlanta, you might hang out, uh, you know, in various, uh, well, I'll say it, if someone is too hard into, uh, crack cocaine or methamphetamine and you know that person and they tell you not to hang out with Wild Jimmy, then don't hang out with Wild Jimmy.

• 41:06Robert Evans?

  Do not hang out with Wild Jimmy.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  But yeah, but this shows us, this shows us the extent of the problem. And perhaps it shows us that the money moved despite observations of what would have been the rule of law, right?

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  Yes, well, which, what was the recommendation of law? Again, they never make a rule against this.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Oh, it's non-binding. Sorry.

• 41:30Robert Evans?

  It's non-binding, right? The pinky swear of law. And the other thing is that, because this is right, right? When those, the Supreme Court is like, yeah, this is an evil system run by evil men. That is right when the program of taking blood from these prisoners is about to start, right? So this is just, you've got a prison system where inmates are not allowed to make money any other way that is already an evil nightmare. And into this situation in 1978, steps a new governor, William Jefferson Clinton, right? That is his first term in office, and he's got a lot of exciting plans for how he wants to reform things in one of the poorest states in the Union. And he's also got a lot of good friends who had helped him win election and who he owed some favors. Both of these things are going to come together in the ambition of several men to make Arkansas

• 42:14Robert Evans?

  prisons a major hub for blood product exports. And all of this is going to be done, these are all Arkansas prisons that are donating, but the hub for donation is Cummins Prison, right? They're sending people there to give donations. That's where the actual, because they build a lab there, right? You have to have some equipment to do this. And again, yeah, because there's like, you know, you've got this perfect, stable supplier position who have no other way to make money. It's just a great place to do this. Now, a few years before Clinton came into office, a doctor named Bud Henderson had formed a company called Health Education Consultants. They did well, and he hired a banker named Leonard Dunn from Little Rock to run business operations eventually.

• 42:57Robert Evans?

  In 1978, they'd renamed themselves HMA and jumped into the prison plasma business with both feet.

• 43:06Robert Evans?

  Henderson had gotten tight with the medical director at the state prison's prison system, John Byus, right, B-Y-U-S. And so he had just negotiated a contract to manage both the plasma program and the clinics at all state prisons, right? So you've got this private company by a doctor, Bud Henderson, and he's got this banker, Leonard Dunn, eventually helping him out. He talks John Byus into giving him the contract to do all of the healthcare, including plasma donation for the whole Arkansas prison system. This makes Arkansas the only state with a prison medical program run by a for-profit company, right?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  That's where this starts. And I'm gonna quote from an article by Susie Parker in Salon here. Susie Parker is an Arkansas investigative journalist. "Byus and Henderson say the motive for the plasma program was twofold. The inmates needed money to buy gum and toiletries, and the destitute prison system needed medical equipment. Arkansas is also one of the only states that refuses to pay prisoners for their labor. Each unit of plasma was sold by HMA, which was running the program under the prison's FDA license, for at least $50, and half was handed over to the prison system. With hundreds of prisoners donating once, sometimes twice a week, plasma became a profitable enterprise. And in fact, in short order, the profits from blood plasma sales turned Arkansas prisons from a line item in the state budget to a net profit enterprise."

• 44:28Robert Evans?

  Because of this program, prisons become profitable in Arkansas, right, to the state.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Cut to Governor Clinton doing a sick saxophone riff.

• 44:37Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, just fucking blazing on that sax.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Oh, the right to bleed.

• 44:43Robert Evans?

  The right to bleed. That is what they call it. That's literally the term. So as we all know, once the profit motive becomes the governing concern over, say, human welfare, people consider some dark things. One of the doctors who worked at Cummins Prison during this time was a guy named Mike Galster. He started in 1979, just as the program got off the ground, and he has since made some terrible allegations. Quote, "I could see prisoners were being given illegal narcotics. Several indicated that this was how they were being paid for their plasma." And so guards are being pressured to sign up prisoners to donate. I think there's some evidence guards are getting kickbacks, you know?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Like incentivized?

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  There's some incentive. And also- Drugs are always in prisons, but there's only one way drugs get into prisons. Cause prisoners can't leave.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:30Robert Evans?

  It's guards, right? Like that's so.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  I mean, come on. I mean. If you, I thought you were gonna be fun about it, but no, you're right.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  No, no, that like, that's the way this works. And this is one of the things that has happened. The other thing that's happening, it's not just guards giving drugs. A lot of prisoners who want the money they get from donating to buy drugs. Because it's prison and drugs make it suck less, right?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Anything can be currency.

• 45:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, anything can be currency, right? Uh, and there's also some evidence that like, some of the prisoners are getting drugs from like the clinics, right? Like they're getting painkillers and shit, which are a lot easier to come by then, right? So even in that case, it's effectively free, right? For the people bribing these drugs. There's at least one case here that we know of a guard taking kickbacks from prisoners who had been rejected from the program because they had bloodborne illnesses. Uh, and letting them donate because they needed drug money. Uh, there's like evidence that of people falsifying data to let people who knowingly had tainted blood continue to give it, right?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Despite, despite clearly provably having something like hepatitis A through C, HIV, et cetera.

• 46:38Robert Evans?

  We have, we have, we know this happened with a doc documented time and it's happening a lot more than that one time, right? You know? Like this, cause this guy's gonna become one of like the couple of people that they try to use as scapegoats later. Now, state investigators later confirmed Goldster's allegations that prison employees traded drugs for blood. Uh, this doctor also observed that many inmate donors he saw, quote, "appeared jaundiced and very sick." Quote, "When I would ask if they had just had a blood test, they would say, 'No, I've just given plasma.'" It was clear they were sick. Now to save costs, this makes it even worse. Again, they want this prison as cheap as possible. What's a big line item if you're doing, uh, blood donations? Boy, you know how expensive needles are? You're supposed to use a new one each time?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  We're throwing money out the door with all these one-use needles.

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Let's just wash them, which is exactly what they do. So they start reusing needles on these prisoners. To get donations, which means not only are sick prisoners, some of whom know they're sick, a lot of whom don't, donating and adding tainted blood to the supply, but also a lot of prisoners who are not sick are getting sick because they donate and then keep continuing to donate and adding even more tainted blood to the system. Um, now, Galster claims he was unaware of the possibility at the time that this could happen, saying later, quote, "I assumed stupidly that our people selling this plasma had some process of cleaning it up." So again, he's a, he's like a prison clinic guy, I said doctor earlier, I don't actually

• 48:08Robert Evans?

  know what his, his, his degree state is, but like, his attitude is like, they've gotta be doing something to make this safe, right?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:15Robert Evans?

  They probably pasteurized blood, right?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it's, you know, the modern era, you gotta, we know, right? We know that someone will do something.

• 48:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, someone will do something.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, someone will always do something. Tragedy of the commons. You walk into a public space and you go, man, surely somebody sweeps here.

• 48:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, somebody's gotta be handling the, uh, they're surely not just sending this to Canada.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, not me, obviously, but surely someone along the chain.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  Someone must be responsible for making sure this doesn't go horribly wrong.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  People can't be that evil, they say.

• 48:56Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And speaking of human, nope, uh, speaking of great people, let's have some more ads.

• 49:59Speaker 05

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• 50:35Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 50:44Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So to save costs, and again, because there's no real oversight to the program, it's also like, if you want to have like a professional phlebotomist, and like phlebotomists are pretty good generally at like taking blood. If you've ever had like a phlebotomist take your blood, and then had like, you know, a nurse who's, that's not their specialty, take your blood, you know that like, when somebody specifically, their whole thing is doing blood draws, it's a much more pleasant process, right?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, they know where the vein is.

• 51:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but here's the thing, both nurses and phlebotomists, phew, expensive. You know who's, you know who works for basically free, taking blood?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 51:26Robert Evans?

  Prison inmates.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry. Also, wait, before we go, I do want to point this out. For anybody who is a nurse or are in, associated, listening, that is not to denigrate at all.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. You guys have a lot of stuff you're doing.

• 51:43Robert Evans?

  I'm just saying like, people who specifically trained to draw blood are better than people who like, that's just one of a bunch of things they do, at drawing blood, generally.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  True, yeah, it's like, it's, it's like a single knife versus a Swiss Army knife.

• 51:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or it's like, it's like how a nurse or a doctor who's like specialized in like, OBGYN, you know, stuff and childbirth, they're going to do a better job of like birthing a child than someone who like, that was just part of my training, but I'm, I'm here to deal with like car crashes and shit. Right?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, so this, this all, you know, just like as a representative of Big Vampire.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  This sounds too expensive.

• 52:18Robert Evans?

  Let's cut all these people out, anyone professional.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, let's get, let's get rid of these fancy degree types. I want someone on the ground who asks fewer questions.

• 52:29Robert Evans?

  Yes, someone who's in prison because they shot two guys, right?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 52:33Robert Evans?

  He should be ta- right, yes, yes, yes, perfect, perfect. One witness to this was a former inmate donor, John Shock, who spoke to Susie Parker. Quote, "They had inmates doing things they shouldn't have been doing. They would let people who, people who was sick bleed. Ain't no telling what they had. They didn't check all the time." And after Shock had been donating for some time, prison medical staff conducted a hepatitis test and he turned up positive. Quote, "I am damn sure I got it, hepatitis C, in the prison. I didn't have it before I went in. I've never had needles stuck in my arm that wasn't supposed to be there. I've never interacted with homosexuals. I love women too." Again, this is the seventies. "I didn't get it those ways." But right, but he, but he is saying that like, "The only time needles were in my arm was when I was doing this blood donation program.

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  Obviously, I got hepatitis from this."

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you don't have to be a perfect person to exercise logic. That's what he's doing, right?

• 53:27Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And he claims that when he gets diagnosed with hepatitis C, they don't kick him out of the donor program. And in fact, he claims the doctor who sees him is like, "Well, your eyes aren't yellow. You don't have jaundice yet, so you're probably fine." He said, quote, "If you start feeling bad, come back and see me." That's just the way they were. They don't care because you are dirt down there anyway.

• 53:50Robert Evans?

  Yep. Ah, prisons, yes.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Ah, prisons.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  And what part of the story here is that like, you know, Americans don't like to think about treating prisoners more nicely. It's never a popular political topic, but when you treat these people like shit and like they're not human, thousands of you might die from tainted, like, that's not why you should care, but there are objective consequences to this evil, right? Like, it never stay, no, no, no evil on a population of people ever stays isolated to that population of people. This is a lesson we never learned, but it is important.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  That's really well put, too.

• 54:26Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Uh, that, that's, that's a, um, that's one of the best articulations.

• 54:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I've heard of that, honestly. I'm not blowing smoke.

• 54:34Robert Evans?

  Uh, no.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  You know, that is, there is a interlinked system.

• 54:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Regardless of whether people want to admit that is the case or not.

• 54:42Robert Evans?

  We're all deeply tied together. These are human beings who live with us and treating them like shit causes problems outside of them, even if you don't care about that group of people. And you should, but like, yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  You should try.

• 54:55Robert Evans?

  You should try. You should care about people.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Maybe, you should maybe not try to give them diseases while stealing their blood.

• 55:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what? That might, that, that might blow up on you.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Is there a reasonable, reasonably low enough bar?

• 55:07Robert Evans?

  Look, I'm not saying none of these guys did terrible things. I'm saying, don't give them diseases while stealing their blood.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I mean, just like, you know, if we're spitballing, right?

• 55:16Robert Evans?

  If we're spitballing, first, first step, maybe don't be a vampire.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  All right, hang on. You said you were gonna be cool.

• 55:23Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. You're right. You're right. You're right. Cause like, sometimes you could be the sexy vampire who winds up getting cast in Bon Jovi movies or, you know, uh, right. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe this, maybe this will give us more Robert Pattinson movies. We, we shouldn't judge. Oh, wait, no, I'm hearing the Arkansas blood donation program did not lead to any Robert Pattinsons.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Wait, you have this confirmed?

• 55:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I have this confirmed. No, it turns out.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  I'm shocked you haven't brought up Nosferatu, as we saw that with Garrison.

• 55:50Robert Evans?

  I'm actually unclear as to whether or not that has something to do with the Arkansas prison system.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 55:55Robert Evans?

  You never know with Willem Dafoe, Sophie.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Think about it.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, Willem Dafoe. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

• 56:03Robert Evans?

  So, the first diagnosed AIDS case, uh, in the United States, uh, happens.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Speaking of segues.

• 56:09Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. Uh, June 16th, 1981. Now, obviously HIV had been spreading around the country for some time before this point, but it takes a while for people to realize, especially because of the way HIV, you know, you have it for a while before you have, you know, you have symptoms that are clearly, you know, it takes a long time to figure out what the fuck is going on, right?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  But once it does, it's become so widespread that there is a fucking panic, right? Um, now, the panic is initially focused mainly in the coasts and kind of the more densely populated areas than rural Arkansas. So while other institutions start taking action to counter this new bloodborne horror, the Arkansas prison system does nothing at all. Bud Henderson, who is again, the doctor who founds the company managing not just the plasma program, But all of the prison clinics in the state said later, "There was mentality that we didn't have any AIDS in the central part of the country." "The Department of Corrections said for years, 'We didn't have any AIDS cases.'" "There was a subconsciousness that we just didn't want to think we had those people around us." Again, the role bigotry plays in all of this cannot be overstated either.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Those people.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  And again, if you just like are fine with horrible things happening to a group of people, it never stays isolated to them. However, Henderson does admit that he was aware of a danger because it had impacted his ability to sell blood overseas.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it hit his money.

• 57:27Robert Evans?

  It hits his money, right? He's pretending, "Obviously, we don't have AIDS in Arkansas, keep drawing." But companies, countries around the world, and the companies that do blood imports for them are like, "This whole bloodborne illness thing, we're maybe not gonna buy as much blood from like shady foreign companies, right? Like, we're really worried about this." And Henderson calls this "the worst possible time for plasma sales." And so, as a result, he's only able to maintain his profits by finding a partner in Canada, a company called Continental Pharma Cryosan, to take the contract. Now, Cryosan is a blood wholesaler. They purchase it, they refine it to specifications that fit what their customers need, and they sell plasma direct to Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Italy, and another Canadian

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  company who uses it to make a factor VIII thing for hemophiliacs. Now, a number of these companies that Cryosan is selling to have banned the purchase of blood on their own soil. And I think all of them have banned the use of blood derived from prison inmates, right? But Cryosan doesn't tell them anything. And I think they're generally aware where a lot of this blood is coming from, but it's like a loophole, right? "No, no, we don't, we don't, we'd never do that." "But that's against, that's against our Swiss ethics, you know, to take advantage of people in that situation, and it's not safe." "Oh, hey, Cryosan, they've got clean blood." And Cryosan ensures the shipping papers say nothing about the fact, the fact that these products have originated from prison donations.

• 58:54Robert Evans?

  The source was just listed as ADC Plasma Center, Grady, Arkansas. You see that, some Japanese guy working at a company that's, you know, sending blood to... Hospitals, fine, you know, whatever.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got the paperwork, you know what I mean?

• 59:08Robert Evans?

  We got the paperwork, it's all good.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Why would somebody be dishonest about a way to make this much money?

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And in 1983, the program does come to a screeching but temporary halt. Because during this process, when they're sending shit to Cryosan, it is found that several units of blood tainted with hepatitis B have made their way to Cryosan and thus overseas. This was a problem at the time because Hep B, we now know, can indicate the presence of HIV, right? Which means we are basically certain that by 83 HIV has entered the Cummins blood supply that's being sent out to all these companies. We don't know exactly when it happens, but the amount of Hep B they're finding suggests that it's pretty widespread by 83. Now, remember, the fact that this tainted blood is leaving the prison also means

• 59:57Robert Evans?

  that it's being spread around inside the prison, some through sex and some through drug use, but it does seem like more than anything because of how many people are donating through tainted needles being used for blood draws, right? Because that lowers costs for the company doing the blood draws. Now, this whole disaster, the fact that a bunch of tainted units of blood gets sent to Canada, is written off as a screening lapse. The FDA closes the donation program in Cummins for a while, you know, in 1983. But in 1984, they publish an investigation that comes to some damning conclusions. Quote, "Health management associates had prematurely and improperly distributed plasma contaminated with hepatitis. Twelve ineligible donors had given blood in a breach of screening process and an international

• 1:00:41Robert Evans?

  recall resulted. The FDA then revoked the center's license to operate. An investigation revealed that the program allowed disqualified donors to bleed, altered records, and stored plasma in ways that didn't prevent contamination. It also found that Plasma Center staff wasn't well-supervised and discovered attempts by people in HMA management positions at the center to hide from FDA inspectors the fact that they had either initiated or condoned the destruction or alteration of records concerning these activities."

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  So this is not just something you can say, "Well, they shouldn't have put it on to the prisoners, but the problem started there." No, no, no. Management is actively covering up that they are producing and selling tainted blood, right?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  They conspired.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  They conspired. They knew. They were incredibly well aware of what they were doing, and they did it all for money. Now, it is obvious, even this is putting the problem that exists too mildly. And in fact, later in 1984, in part based on the FDA's investigation, the National Correctional Association puts out an informational bulletin to members, and their members are prisons, warning that plasma centers are a bad idea. You shouldn't have them in prisons, right? And as a result, most US prisons that had been in the process of like, making plans and contracts to do plasma donation programs, stop. Because their whole organization is like, actually, this is a terrible idea. You are opening yourself up to so much fucking liability. Like, just don't do it, right? But the prisons in Arkansas don't stop.

• 1:02:04Robert Evans?

  Company founder Bud Henderson considered the program critical, not just for his own bottom line, but for the welfare of the state itself. And Bud argued it's, quote, "for the good of the inmates", because the prison needed money too. You have to understand. That's why we have taxes, Bud.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  No, they like it though. They like it though.

• 1:02:28Robert Evans?

  You want to be able to cut those, yeah. By the early 1980s, that's when he brings in Leonard Dunn to run his company, right? I mentioned this earlier, this lawyer from Little Rock. Leonard Dunn is a confidant and friend of Bill Clinton. He's this like, you know, he's a banker, right? And Clinton had appointed him at the same time as he's being made the head of HMA. Governor Clinton appoints him to the head of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Now, Clinton also appoints HMA's attorney, Don Smith, to the Board of Corrections for the state. So, we're seeing these people, one is a close friend of his, being put in charge of HMA, and also HMA's attorney is being put on the Board of Corrections, right? So there's some direct involvement here of the Clinton administration.

• 1:03:11Robert Evans?

  And they're at this point trying to get the program going again, because it makes the prison system solvent.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  And then the question that we have to ask, on behalf of everybody tuning in, the question is, at what threshold can we still maintain some sort of possible, if not plausible, deniability, right?

• 1:03:32Robert Evans?

  That is the question. We'll be dealing with throughout the episode. Um, but this is what this is what's happened right now. Okay. Um, so months after the FDA shut things down and issued a report condemning the whole operation, HMA creates a subsidiary called Arkansas Blood Components or ABC Plasma, and they keep selling the blood that way, right? Including to that and to Cryosan, the company that uses tainted US inmate blood, uh, that they are there selling this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. Now, at Cummins, plasma donations continued, and by all accounts, most if not all of the same problems persisted. So they get relicensed, right? Um, and the next year, in 1985, stories come out that Arkansas prisons had more inmate

• 1:04:15Robert Evans?

  complaints than any other state, not just due to the blood program, but more broadly due to hideous issues with rape and abuse by guards and poor facilities. This is a black mark on Governor Clinton's record, and so he decides we need to take some serious action in the prisons. Not probably necessarily fix anything, but I'm going to have the state police conduct an internal investigation into what went wrong here, right? Susie Parker writes, "The state police prison investigation resulted in two misdemeanor charges and one felony charge for employees running a gambling operation. Only a few weeks into it, Clinton himself urged a speedy into the probe. 'I told them to get it done and get it over with,' Clinton told reporters. Complaints about poor healthcare and the plasma program resulted in no action, and

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  the Arkansas Department of Corrections Director Abe Lockhart, who had been at the center of the allegations, was not punished. Clinton said the prison system had been studied to death and refused to oust Lockhart." Now, Susie's right to center Abe, uh, Art Lockhart, the Department of Corrections Director, because he is one of three men who control the state prison system. The other two are a state senator named Knox Nelson and a state representative named Bill Foster. Now, there are allegations that all three men, uh, or at least men close to them, profited directly from the blood program, often by awarding contracts to local businesses who supported them and their campaigns. One good article that I read in the Arkansas Times on the matter interviewed Bobby Roberts,

• 1:05:39Robert Evans?

  currently the director of the Arkansas Library System, uh, or later the director of the Arkansas Library System, and a former member of Governor Clinton's staff, and he blames Newton and Foster for blocking any attempts to reform the system. Roberts recalled it as a time when Nelson held the upper hand over Clinton with regard to the prison system, which was headquartered in his district. Roberts said Nelson made it clear to Clinton that as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, he would prevent legislation that the governor wanted in other areas, such as schools, roads, and economic development, from ever reaching a vote if Clinton pressed for changes in the prisons. "Knox and I got into about everything into it about everything under the sun," Roberts said. "I don't think any governor was going to cross him and a handful of other senators down there and think he was going to get anything done." There was a lot of politics that went on in those things.

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

  You really could not do anything with the ADC if you ran afoul of Bill Foster and Knox-Nelson. That's just the reality of it. So Roberts' allegation is that part of what's happening here is these guys see a lot of use in the plasma program because it's bringing in money not just to the prison system, but it creates a lot of opportunity to like give people work and contracts that also profit them. And it's not just the blood system, the whole fact Arkansas prisons are uniquely fucked up in the US at this point in time, and part of it is because they are being run by these guys who see them as a way to get kickbacks and bribes for their friends, right? That's effectively what's happening. And their threat is like, hey, whatever else you want to do in the state of Arkansas,

• 1:07:07Robert Evans?

  Bill, you won't get to do if you fuck with this golden goose of ours. So just stay the fuck away, right?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Just wrap it up. Wrap up the investigation. Get back to your fucking saxophone and play nice.

• 1:07:20Robert Evans?

  Then you could do some shit with the schools and become president, right?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Whatever you want, buddy. Whatever you want, just keep the blood flowing.

• 1:07:28Robert Evans?

  That's one allegation, right? Now Roberts writes Clinton a letter at this point, right? Telling him that appointing HMA attorney Don Smith to the Corrections Board had been a terrible idea, right? So he's mostly blaming these guys in like the local legislature, but he's also like, why would you put this guy, this attorney at this company that just got shut down by the FDA on the Corrections Board, right? And he, his claim, and Roberts would for years claim, plasma donations were never like our main concern when it came to prison reform. But he says that it was known to everybody working in the prison system that the program was poorly run and was a disaster waiting to happen. In his letter, he described HMA to Bill Clinton as, quote, "a time bomb waiting to blow up in somebody's face."

• 1:08:11Robert Evans?

  And before longer, it would do just that. But that's going to be in part two. How you feeling, Ben?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I'm so stoked, you know, about how how great this is all going.

• 1:08:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's gonna be good.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  I I am, I I feel like this is a real cliffhanger, right? This is a this is a turn moment.

• 1:08:36Robert Evans?

  Maybe it all works fine.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, who knows, Robert?

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  Maybe it turns out we don't have enough hepatitis, you know? Have we considered that? Yes, we have.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe maybe the real blood money was the friends we made along the way and whatever. But yes, this is a story more people need to learn about. And I I think it's a story that a lot of people are a little bit shook to investigate. Because in very divisive domestic times, it may tell you a narrative that you don't want to hear.

• 1:09:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, uh.

• 1:09:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I I think that's like a that's a very good way to put it. And I I think the bigger like the big part of this story is like the distributed system of making great evil, right? Very rarely is it like somebody comes in with a plan, a scheme to do something monstrous. It's more incentives align and a bunch of people make little compromises. And a few people at the top do, you know, are just psychopaths who are like, yeah, I don't give a fuck how many people get tainted blood. I want my money, you know?

• 1:09:48Robert Evans?

  Anyway. Uh, it's cool stuff. Uh, also, I am now thinking of that song Tainted Love, but like about tainted blood. So that's going to be going on in my head for a while.

• 1:10:03Robert Evans?

  Anyway, whatever, nobody needs that. Nobody needs me singing in this podcast.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  We need we need someone to write the full parody lyrics of this. Send it to us.

• 1:10:14Robert Evans?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Copyright free.

• 1:10:16Robert Evans?

  Copyright free, absolutely, you know?

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Copyright or whatever.

• 1:10:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know, get a whole band together, do it. Uh, I don't know what we'd use it for because we're already recording the episode, but you know.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  I think maybe like a, like, yeah, thank you in advance, folks. Uh, maybe like a, uh, just a, just a non sequitur, you know, there's no joke, like an old joke, especially a specific one. So give it, you know, give it a few years.

• 1:10:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll throw it up in a year in an episode on Heinrich Himmler, you know?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:10:50Robert Evans?

  Fuck it.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  That's the real banality of evil. Oh, geez.

• 1:10:54Robert Evans?

  So Ben, uh, where can people find you on the internet.com?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Ah, yes, the internet.com. That's a real up and coming thing. And thank you for asking, Robert. Well, you can find me hanging out occasionally, uh, with you on Behind the Bastards in ages past. You can, uh, check out Critical Thinking, Applied Allegations of Conspiracy and Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, or Ridiculous History. Uh, you can also find myself, calling me self, uh, at Ben Bullen in a burst of creativity, uh, wherever there's an at sign. Uh, and then, you know, before now, you could have found me just, uh, freestyle selling blood on the streets, but I'm really excited about the, the catalytic converter thing. I, I think this, I think that's going to be big for us.

• 1:11:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's going to be big for us and obviously big for all of you who lose your catalytic converters. But hey, we've got extras that we took from you. Anyway.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll sell them back.

• 1:11:53Robert Evans?

  We'll sell them back. That's the episode, everybody. Come back to part two.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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