Outstanding Documentaries - Blood Business: The New Cannibalism? (2020)

Donating plasma is often seen as an act of giving & selflessness. But do you know where your plasma donations go? Most people assume they're sent to hospitals where they're used in life-saving emergency transfusions, but that's not the whole story. Not even half. Turns out, only 20% of the plasma is used in hospitals--the other 80% is sent to private pharmaceutical companies to be used in the development of proprietary biological products sold to customers around the world for top dollar prices while "donors" (a misnomer as they're actually compensated, though meagerly) are given a pittance: about $50-$75 per appointment.

This is just one of the alarming facts exposed in Blood Business by Java Films. The filmmakers delve deep into this seedy industry that under-compensates donors who are often homeless, addicted to drugs or sick with serious diseases in exchange for this vital bodily fluid referred to as "liquid gold" by those in the plasma game.

Plasma donor describes the rush of a K2 high

Blood Business pulls back the curtain on a shady industry that played a huge role in the spread of the HIV virus in the 1970s (Google "Hemo-Caribbean" for more on that) which ran a similarly dirty operation in Haiti before shipping their plasma products to the U.S--the only country on Earth that would accept blood products from places with such lax hygiene standards. However, filmmakers are repeatedly thrown off the property & threatened with trespassing charges by police for simply trying to conduct interviews with plasma donors which sets an ominous tone for the movie.

The high point of the doc is the interview with a drug addicted donor who is selling plasma to finance his habit. It raises not only ethical questions but major safety ones. What are the health implications of accepting blood products from people who use novel Frankenstein chemicals like Spice & K2? Why are clinics allowing donors to give blood more than the recommended number of times per month, and what could the long-term health consequences be for them? (Even a single donation can lead to side effects like fainting, serious infections, bleeding & dehydration). Should the pharma giants getting rich off these vulnerable patients be required to pay them fairly for their vital donations? Should that even be a question?

Police "protecting" Octapharma from filmmakers

The demand for these plasma products is high: they're life-saving and currently can't be made synthetically, which raises questions about the ethics of paying people for their plasma. (The financial incentive tends to attract people who need the money rather than those who are there for altruistic reasons, which is why we don't pay people for blood donations. Whole blood is also a vital resource but paying donors makes the blood supply less safe). The supply has to come from somewhere, and the U.S. just so happens to have a dense population of drug-addicted, poor and needy people willing to do anything for the small amount of cash they get for selling their lifeblood.

The incentive for industries like this (and the war profiteers, who recently made remarks about military recruitment being affected by student loan forgiveness) to keep people desperately poor to keep their cheap supply of labor/bodies rolling in cannot be ignored. These interests have huge lobbying power in D.C. & finance the campaigns of candidates from both parties. Incidentally, it's illegal in most of the world to trade money for plasma. Only 5 countries allow it: Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria & the U.S.

Tracing the plasma's path from from the 'hoods of Cleveland to its final destination in the upscale Lake Zurich, Switzerland, Blood Business is a masterful documentary that paints a dark picture of the state of U.S. vampire capitalism in the 21st Century. The contrast between us and other developed nations is so stark in this film it will take your breath away, from the rampant poverty to the widespread drug addiction to the aggressive policing and corporate exploitation of our most vulnerable. As we claw our way back from the worst pandemic in American history, you can't help but feel like another is lurking in the shadows when watching movies like this. We're repeating the mistakes of the blood banks during the AIDS epidemic by relying on high-risk donors to self-report things like underlying health conditions & other dangerous behaviors that could taint the plasma supply in ways we can't even predict yet.