Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Tainted Human Blood Became A Major U.S. Export

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

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 for privacy information.

Oh My god welcome back to behind the bastards a Podcast where me and my guests 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? Finally, you know I mean finally We've been we've been the dream Living the dream, dying the dream, yes. Here we go. Yeah, it's great to, 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 an appearance, a cameo, dropped a hot 16 on a show we do called Ridiculous History. Yes.

Do you remember that? I do remember that, yes, about the governor of, or one of the founders of Oregon, if I'm not mistaken. You're right. Yes. How Oregon originated as a supremacist paradise. Yeah. 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 intricately involved in this story, or at least Bill is. But Ben, what do you know about the blood industry? Do you mean like Ben Bowlin? Host of stuff they don't want you to know and ridiculous

history and a bunch of other stuff. All right. Yes. You mentioned one of them. Yes. Like as a fan or just the industry overall? Are you, so you are a fan of blood. You're a big blood guy. Yeah, that's what people say about me, yeah. Yeah, I mean, who doesn't? I enjoy having roughly five liters of blood in my body. That's what everybody says about you, man. 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. Yeah. I also love, like know, like any other, any other damn peer, I am a huge supporter of blood donations. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Huge supporter, yes. 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 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. Yeah. 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? Ooh, by value. Not by liquid weight. Okay.

No, no. Blood and blood products. How much of chunk of the US economy do you think that would be? Clever. Clever question, Robert, because that would factor in things like plasma, not just whole blood. Right, yes, of course. Yes, yes, yes.

Okay, so with that, I would... Gosh, it's a difficult question. It's a difficult question. I don't know the answer. It is the ninth largest export for the entire United States. Holy shit. Yes. It beats like coal.

Blood is a massive industry in the United States. Again, it's one of our largest exports. 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. Like it's much larger. I did not realize when I started how big a,

like that's a significant piece of the economy. That's top 10. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, man. And here's the thing, that's like shocking when you just like, I never would have thought of, 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. The plasma? Yes, yes. 70% of all blood plasma used on the planet in medicine comes from here. We are the largest exporter of blood products on the planet and no one else comes very close.

Go USA. 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, 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, 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. And when you're talking about blood, that's going to lead you to do some fucked up shit that has some hideous consequences, right? Yes. And 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 9-elevens worth of Canadians, English people, and other folks around the planet. This is a dark story and it's all set in the Arkansas prison system. 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. While we've always known that you need blood, medical science has tended to focus throughout

most of history on maybe people have too much blood, maybe 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 messy process of figuring out like how blood works. And yeah. 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... 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 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? It's just, it all just looks like blood to me, you know? Just like if you put like blood from somebody and somebody who cannot take a donation from them, if you're dealing with 16, you don't know about blood types.

How would how would you how would that possibly be? Come to you. Yeah. You should already get bonus points for recognizing the blood exist. 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 them and drain a bunch of that shit out.

This guy with a sword wound probably has too much blood left in him. 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 you're- The balance is wrong.

Yeah. You have to think about it like, if we took a bunch of computers back to like 900 BC, 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. Right, like we have to sacrifice a certain amount of people. Yes, yes, the computers demand blood. Sometimes if the computer doesn't work, it's because there's too much blood. There's too much blood. 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 pin. Yeah. Yeah, maybe we should look out for the Outlook religion. Mm-hmm You know what? I'm gonna get on that one I'm gonna need I've been meaning to have like a sacrificial knife made for me, so this could end well for everybody. I'm not impressed. You don't have that? Uh huh.

I have a sacrificial knife, but it's not nice enough to fix Microsoft Outlook, Sophie. Or do you just have a knife that has occasionally been used for sacrifice? Well, I mean, yeah, actually this one, right? Yeah. Folks, Robert just did pull it up. And while you know, it is to his right. It is to his right. Keep it near me. You never know.

You know my motto, ABS, baby, always be sacrificing. You never know which god, Babylonian deities, there's all sorts of gods out there that need blood. You know? I never know when which God, you know, Babylonian deities, there's all sorts of gods out there that need blood. You know, I never know. 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. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

It's incredible. Oh yeah, the Bowie. Yeah, yeah, it's a nice one. Yeah. Ooh, I like the teeth. That's a Ford Bontempsky Bowie from New Zealand. It's a really nice knife. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, the Kiwis in the audience will be impressed. Ford Bontemsky, Bowie. It's a really nice night. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, the Kiwis in the audience will be impressed.

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Listen to Happy Face on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me.

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So we didn't get blood transfusion right the first time. Not for a bit. 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 rare, much better than that, where he's like, maybe we should just start by trying to replace people's blood.

I'm going to work with dogs, see if I can get that down. Two years later, a French physician and Richard Lower separately carried out successful blood transfusions from lambs to human beings. And 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, 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's going on here, 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 use coconut water for transfusions because of like, I think the amount of potassium is one problem, 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? 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. Well, it's also like, you know, a modern comparison, Robert, might be the idea of heart transplants, right? With non-human organs. Right, right. Not to get too far ahead, but like that's, that's a situation where 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 facts human heart Just like it reminds me of and I don't I don't know no enough to speak off expertise here but it reminds me of like that old trick with speak off expertise here, but it reminds me of like that old trick with, uh, with elderly cars, I'll call them vintage cars, where if the radiator is fucking up, you can put, you can put a couple 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. It is a little, and it's, it's also this thing and 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 two 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 because it's not supposed to be in there, right? Right, right. Quick question though. Quick question. Yeah. 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... If that's how it happened, it is a little unclear. But yeah, 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? Yeah. Given the state of things at the time, straight liquor. What if we just put some Jim Bean in there? Will that save their lives? And they're like, no, we're saving the liquor for the guys who aren't bleeding out. Yeah, we need all of that Jim Bean. We are island hopping, fighting the empire of Japan.

Nobody wants to sleep sober at night. Give him some coconut water or some shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 transfusion is like generally listed as 1818.

It was by a British doctor treating a postpartum hemorrhage. And the science kind science 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. Initially, they're starting out with whole blood. People find out over decades and stuff that actually you can take different elements of blood and add in a substitute, I think saline is usually used, and do infusions of that for certain problems.

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. Sounds like big dairy to me, bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure the fucking dairy companies were like fighting fighting like hell to have that be The case so it's what first it's it's what's in your blood There it is. 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 There's 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 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 bled enough, time to scab, you know?

All gas, no breaks. All gas, no breaks with the bleeding. And the first of these medications 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 MD 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 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 several times a week. This means essentially that people who are already ill with a life-threatening

disease in 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, you medicines, it's one of those things where because we developed this, 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 a random person who was in a car accident or got shot, or whether there's somebody with hemophilia or one of a number of diseases and disorders that make them require. 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. 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 dollars off of that barrel. Oh, like if you steal a Honda Civic, you make more money selling parts of the Civic.

Exactly, exactly. But, you know, Ben, 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 whole fail. You just get a sack of cats delivered to your door. You know? Mm-hmm. Which is the new up and coming, we call it kiddo currency.

Mm-hmm. It is Evans and Boland's. That's right. Sophie Ray production. We're limited liability companies, so don't try to come at us. Don't even try. 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. They are not light. This is going to be great for our lats. 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. 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 a goat and they're like I'm fucking ahead.

I'm ready. I'm ready. And several other people are listening on their earbuds as they saw someone's cat from the bottom of a Prius. 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 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. 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 just growing functional blood in a lab, which is a thing people are trying to figure out. 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, isn't it?

It's not that bad, right, donating. If you've donated, 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. Yeah, the orange juice and the crackers don't quite get you back to a hundred percent. I think it was something like pre-pandemic,

I wanna say, still a very small amount of people in the US donated blood. Yes, and it's great to donate, but there's also another problem 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 were taking thousands of people's blood plasma and mixing it together. Group project. It's a group project.

And if say there's, I'm throwing a number out of my ass here, 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, you know, 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 kinda how tainted blood works. 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? And so the odds of recipients getting sick

from an 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. Oh Yeah, okay, so it's like maybe a Concentration of those vectors, something like that.

Yeah, that's my guess. The further I say this, the dumber I'll sound. Yeah, I don't know why, but this is what the medical paperwork says, is that blood products, when those are used on you, if they're tainted, they're likelier to spread disease than whole blood. And this exists in a profit-seeking environment.

And this exists in a profit where there's a buckle of billions on the table. 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. And in that initial outbreak, a bunch of hemophiliacs caught HIV through their transfusions and got sick and died. But before and during HIV, it was still never the most common illness spread through blood donations, and most common illnesses spread through blood and blood product donations are hepatitis A, B, and C. We have 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 it in people, and we couldn't detect it in blood products until 1992. We've only very recently been able to actually 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. What you've got, if we're talking about the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, is a supply of something crucial that is inherently limited. Part of the issue here is that when we're talking about the international blood trade, if you've got a country with endemic hepatitis of some sort, 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 the 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 going to 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. An oversight and regulation of the blood industry is basically non-existent at this point.

Many if not most paid donors are IV drug users, the homeless and prisoners. 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 lack 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 because you didn't do your due diligence to make sure this stuff is safe, that ain't on you. We need the blood this badly. Get it however, you know? Yeah, like our ongoing, quite successful bag of catalytic converters business.

Exactly, exactly. Again, limited liability. Limited liability, yeah, exactly. Why would we be liable for what happens to people's cars? They're not our cars. Speaking of cars, you know what you should buy is if a car is advertised next, that, otherwise whatever else. Is this a good time?

It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend, Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour. It's musical mayhem and it is going to be so much fun. I like a man. You like a man. What do I like, Joe? You like a man too. We often-

We have quite a similar- There's some cross pollination happening in here. Not like- No! Have we? No. No. Not yet. Never say never.

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He's known as the Happy Face Serial Killer. Listen to the hit iHeart Podcast that inspired the new TV series. Happy Face tells the story of Melissa Moore finding out her father was the notorious Happy Face Killer in 1995. Listen to Happy Face on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower?

From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived,

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Listen to the hookup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one.

And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless And we're back. So in the late 1960s, a researcher named Richard Titmuss 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 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 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. 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. 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.

Or if someone had previously donated to one institution. Right. Yes. Yes. to one institution. Right, yes, yes. And there's a lot of in these companies, well, we'll just destroy some records or whatever, right? Now, following the advice that Titmuss 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. The blood money industry? Right, the blood money. Yes, yes. So 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 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. Ah, the people who are loopholes enslaved in this country? Yes, yes, yes. And 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, and a prison, there is no mandated oversight. The FDA is basically not involving themselves, or at least not initially. And as long as this stays a scarce product, drug companies are allowed to buy their blood from quote, unlicensed, uninspected vendors. 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. The days of stray blood are over. That's right. That's what we're aspiring toward. I hate that we have to bring this up. Another thing going into this, if we are counting something, we being human civilization as a vital resource,

such that we're gonna cut some corners to get enough of it Sure. Yeah, do 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 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. 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. 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. Yeah, because these people have the, the the US penal system have very little recourse towards any alternative, right? These are also the days of benighted experiments on human beings. Yes. And all of that is going down. And 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. The prisoner's need for cash is also stable. This makes for an extremely predictable flow of product. In 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. In 1974, 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. Right, right. And further, come on, let's spend a little time just scratching behind

the ears of statements like non-binding. Yeah. Come on. Pinky swear me. You guys like let's pinky swear. Just not here. Right. Just somewhere else. Like somewhere else. So it's not our problem. The earlier laws regarding US produced propaganda, for instance, right? Right. Oh, geez. Well, this don't do it here. Don't do it here. Don't you know, it's like it's like the shitty stepdad. Yeah. About smoking cigarettes. Yeah, just don't do it. Well, you know, I can see it.

I don't want to tell you, mama smelled it. Yeah. Yes. Yes. The FDA 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 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. Some of them, again, this is 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. The blood donation program is going to become the only way Arkansas prison inmates can get cash.

Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. In 1978, the US Supreme Court had found that Arkansas' 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 them is a Supreme Court justice looking at it and be like, wow, this is like Mordor. This is fucked. I'm a federal judge in the sixties and this is bad. Or seventies. Well, still, I had someone in that level of the judiciary at that time, they probably got their own crimes under the belt.

They've seen some shit. Yeah, they got that Seventh League stare. 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. Wow. It's too far. It's too far. What did you do?

It's like, it's like here in Atlanta, you might hang out, you know, in various, well, I'll say it it if someone is too hard into crack cocaine or Methamphetamine and you know that person and they tell you not to hang out with wild Jimmy Yeah, don't hang out with wild do not hang out with wild Jimmy 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?

Yes. Well, what was the recommendation of law? Can they ever make a rule against this? Oh, it's non-binding. Sorry. It's non-binding. Right. The pinky swear of law.

And the other thing is that, because this is right, right when 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. 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 prisons a major hub for blood product exports. All of this is going to be done.

These are all Arkansas prisons that are donating, but the hub for donations is Cummins prison. They're sending people there to give donations. That's where the actual... Because they build a lab there. You have to have some equipment to do this. Again, because 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. In 1978, they'd renamed themselves HMA and jumped into the prison plasma business with both feet. Henderson had gotten tight with the medical director at the state prison system, John Bias, right?

B-Y-U-S. So he and Hannah just negotiated a contract to manage both the plasma program and the clinics at all state prisons, right? BYUS. And so he and Hannah just negotiate 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 Byas 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?

Interesting. That's where this starts. I'm going to quote from an article by Susie Parker in Salon here. Susie Parker is an Arkansas investigative journalist. Bias 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. Because of this program, prisons become profitable in Arkansas, right, to the state. Cut to Governor Clinton doing a sick saxophone riff.

Oh yeah, yeah, just fucking blazing on that sax. Oh, the right to bleed. 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, in order to help. There's some incentive. And also drugs are always in prisons, but there's only one way drugs get into prisons because prisoners can't leave. It's guards, right? I mean, come on. I thought you were going to be fun about it, but no, you're right.

No, no, 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? Anything can be currency.

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

blood continue to give it, right? Despite clearly provably having something like hepatitis A through C, HIV, et cetera. We know this happened with a documented time, and it's happening a lot more than that one time, right? You know? Yeah. Because this guy's going to become one of the couple of people that they try to use as scapegoats later.

Now, state investigators later confirmed Gholster's allegations that prison employees traded drugs for blood. 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 blood donations. Boy, you know how expensive needles are? You're supposed to use a new one each time? We're throwing money out the door with all these one-use needles. 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 them 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. Now, Golster 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 like a prison clinic guy. I said doctor earlier. I don't actually know what his degree state is, but his attitude is like, they've gotta be doing something to make this safe, right?

Right? They can probably pasteurized blood, right? Yeah, like it's, you know, the modern era. You got to, yeah, we know, right? We know that someone will do something. It's like, yeah, someone will do something. 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. Yeah, somebody's gotta be handling the, surely not just sending this to Canada. I mean, you know, not me obviously, but surely someone along the chain. Someone must be responsible for making sure this doesn't go horribly wrong.

People can't be that evil, they say. Right, and speaking of human, nope, speaking of great people, let's have some more ads. Is this a good time? It's me, Dylan Mulvaney, and my dear friend, Joe Locke from Heartstopper and Agatha All Along is my very first guest on my brand new podcast, The Dylan Hour.

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Listen to The Hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. 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 phlebotomist 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 whose that's not their specialty, take your blood. You know that like when somebody's specifically their whole thing is doing blood draws, it's a much more pleasant process, right?

They know where the vein is. Yeah. But here's the thing, both nurses and phlebotomists, expensive, you know, who works for basically free, taking blood? Prison inmates. Oh, hi. 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.

No, no, no. You guys have a lot of stuff you do. I'm just saying people who specifically train to draw blood are better than people who like that's just one of a bunch of things they do at drawing. True. Yeah. It's like a single knife versus a Swiss army knife.

Yeah. Or it's like how a nurse or a doctor who's like specialize in like OBGYN, you know, stuff in 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 here to deal with like car crashes and shit, right? Right, yes. This all, you know, just like as a representative of big vampire, this sounds too expensive.

Let's cut all these people out, anyone professional. Yeah, yeah, let's get rid of these fancy degree types. I want someone on the ground who asks fewer questions. Yes someone who's in prison because they shot two guys 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 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 70s.

I didn't get it those ways. But right, but he is saying that like, the only time needles were in my arm was when I was doing this blood donation program. Obviously I got hepatitis from this. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to be a perfect person to exercise logic. That's what he's doing, right?

No, yeah, 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. Yep. Ah, prisons, yes. Ah, prisons. 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 stayed, 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. That's really well put too. Yes. That's, that's a, that's one of the best articulations I've heard of that. Honestly, I'm not blowing smoke. You know, that is, there is a interlinked system, regardless of whether people want to admit that is the case or not.

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. You should try. You should try. You should care about people. You should maybe not try to give them diseases

while stealing their blood. Yeah, you know what? That might blow up on you. Is that a reasonable, reasonably low enough bar? Look, I'm not saying none of these guys did terrible things. I'm saying don't give them diseases while stealing their blood. I mean, just like, you know, if you're spitballing, right? If we're spitballing first, first step, maybe don't be a vampire.

All right. Hang on. You said you were going to be cool. Mm hmm. You're right. You're right. You're right. It's like sometimes you could be the sexy vampire who winds up getting cast in Bong Joon-Ho movies, or, you know. Right, yeah. Maybe this will give us more Robert Pattinson movies. We shouldn't judge.

Oh, wait, no, I'm hearing the Arkansas Blood Donation Program did not lead to any Robert Pattinson's. Wait. You have this confirmed? Yeah, yeah, I have this confirmed. I'm shocked you haven't brought up Nosferatu as we saw that with Garrison. I'm actually unclear as to whether or not

that has something to do with the Arkansas prison system. Ah, okay. You never know with Willem Dafoe, Sophie. Think about it. Yeah, Willem Dafoe, perfect, perfect, perfect. So the first diagnosed AIDS case in the United States Speaking in segues. Right, yeah.

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 have it for a while before you have symptoms that are clearly, it takes a long time to figure out what the fuck is going on, right?

But once it does, it's become so widespread that there is a fucking panic, right? 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. Those people.

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. Oh, it hit his money. It hits his money, right? He's pretending, obviously we don't have AIDS in Arkansas, keep drawing, but countries around the world and the companies that do blood imports for them are like, this whole blood borne illness thing, we're maybe not going to buy as much blood from 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 company who uses it to make a factor eight 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. That 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 cryo sand ensures the shipping papers say nothing about the facts the fact that these products have originated from prison Donations 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. Yeah, we got the paperwork. You know, we got the hospitals. Fine. You know, whatever. Yeah.

We got the paperwork. You know what I mean? We got the paperwork. It's all good. Why would somebody be dishonest about a way to make this much money? 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 HEPB, 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 HIV 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 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, this is 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. 12 ineligible donors had given blood in a breach of screening process and an international 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. It 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. 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.

They conspired. 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. 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. As a result, most US prisons that had been in the process of 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. Just don't do it, right? But the prisons in Arkansas don't stop. 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. No, they like it though. They like it though. 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.

I mentioned this earlier, this lawyer from Little Rock. Leonard Dunn is a confidant and friend of Bill Clinton. 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, and they're at this point trying to get the program going again because it makes the prison system solvent. So months- 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? That is the question we'll be dealing with throughout the episode. But this is what's happened right now, right? 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, including to CryoSan, the company that uses tainted USN-made blood, 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? And the next year, in 1985, stories come out that Arkansas prisons had more inmate 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 to necessarily fix anything, but I'm going to have the state police conduct an internal investigation into what went wrong here.

Right? Suzy 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 end to 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 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 Suzy's right to center 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, 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, currently the director of the Arkansas Library system, or later the director of the Arkansas

Library system, and a former member of Governor Clinton's staff. He blames Newton and Foster for blocking any attempts to reform the system. Roberts recalled that it was 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 it about everything under the sun, Robert 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. 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. 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 give people work and contracts that also profit them. 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 wanna do in the state of Arkansas of Arkansas bill you won't get to do if you fuck with this Golden goose of ours, so just stay the fuck away, right? Just wrap it up wrap up the Investigation get back to your fucking saxophone right and play nice. Mm-hmm Then you could do some shit with the schools and become president, right? Whatever you want buddy, whatever you want, just keep the blood flowing. 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? Roberts would for years claim plasma donations were never 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. And before longer, it would do just that. But that's going to be in part two. How you feeling, Ben?

Oh, man, I'm so stoked, you know, about how great this is all going. Yeah, it's gonna be good. I feel like this is a real cliffhanger, right? This is a turn moment. Maybe it all works fine. Yeah, you know, who knows Robert? Maybe it turns out we don't have enough hepatitis, you know? Have we considered that?

Yes, we have. Yeah, 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 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.

Yeah. I think that's a very good way to put it. I think 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? Anyway, it's cool stuff. 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. Tainted blood. Anyway, whatever. Nobody needs that. Nobody needs me singing in this podcast. Everybody needs it. We need someone to write the full parody lyrics of this. Send it to us copyright free. Copyright free. Absolutely. Right. Or copy left or whatever.

Yeah. Get a whole band together. Do it. I don't know what we'd use it for because we're already recording the episode. But I think maybe like a like, yeah, thank you in advance, folks. Maybe like a 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.

Yeah, we'll throw it up in a year in an episode on Heinrich Himmler, you know. Oh boy. Fuck it. That's the real banality of evil. Oh, geez. So Ben, where can people find you on the internet.com? 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 with you on Behind the Bastards and Ages Past.

You can check out critical thinking, applied allegations of conspiracy and stuff they don't want you to know or ridiculous history. You can also find myself calling meself at Ben Bowlin and a verse to creativity wherever there's an at sign. And then, you know, before now, you could have found me just freestyle

selling blood on the streets, but I'm really excited about the catalytic converter thing. I think that's gonna be big for us. Yeah, yeah. No, it's gonna 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.

Yeah, we'll sell them back. We'll sell them back. That's the episode, everybody. Come back to part two. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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. Growing up is tough, but finding out your dad is not who you thought he was is downright terrifying.

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