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

Welcome back to the podcast that this is, which is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about how to mine prison labor for their sweet, sweet blood. Uh-oh, hepatitis.
That's the story we're telling today. Whoops, all heps.
Yeah, whoops, all them all folks uh if you're getting doing blood donations with needles that have been used on dozens of other people in the prison anyway ben bolan my guest today ben ridiculous history stuff they don't want you to know podcast maven impresario uh yeah um how are you doing how you feeling i'm doing well i gotta tell you robert i got a little bit of epaulette envy right now because your jacket's pretty sick uh i got i got a jacket like that but it's uh you know it's stored away for specific purposes i apologize i'm like some guy rocking up to the white house without a suit on you know, it's stored away for specific purposes. I apologize.
I'm like some guy rocking up to the White House without a suit on, you know? I mean, I live in a place where you get to wear clothing like this regularly because it's cold. So it's part of why I left Texas.
I really like jackets and boy, very few places are worse for needing a jacket than Texas. You heard it here first, folks.
Yeah, yeah. When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof, like Ello or Allbirds or Skims, sure, you think about a great product, a cool brand, and brilliant marketing.
But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business, making selling simple. For millions of businesses,

that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet.
And the not-so-secret secret, with ShopPay that boosts conversions

up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going...

So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Allbirds uses.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash try, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash try to upgrade your selling today.
Shopify.com slash try. 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, dickless version of me.
And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, Dickless 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 S**t with Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace to the planet.
I go by the name of Charlemagne the God. And guess what? I can't wait to see y'all at the third annual Black Effect Podcast Festival.
That's right. We're coming back to Atlanta, Georgia, Saturday, April 26th at Pullman Yards.
And it's hosted by none other than Decisions, Decisions, Mandy B and Weezy. OK, we got the R&B Money podcast with Tank and Jay Valentine.
We got the Woman of All podcast with Sarah Jake Roberts. We got Good Moms, Bad Choices.
Carrie Champion will be there with her Nekka Sports podcast. and the Trap Nerds podcast with more to be announced.
And of course, it's Bigger Than Podcast. We're bringing the Black Effect marketplace with black-owned businesses, plus the food truck court to keep you fed while you visit us, all right? Listen, you don't want to miss this.
Tap in and grab your tickets now at blackeffect.com slash podcast festival. Proudly sponsored by Nissan.
Safe on family favorites at Safeway. This week at Safeway, get 4 to 6 ounce Yoplait yogurt or 5.6 ounce protein yogurt for the member price of just 39 cents each when you buy 10.
Plus, get 2-pound containers of strawberries for the member price of $4.97 each. Also, this week at Safeway, get six to eight ounce Lucerne shredded, sliced, or chunk cheese for $1.97 each with digital coupon limit for items.
Visit Safeway.com or head in store for more deals. So, you know, let's get back into talking about blood, the big B.
So, as I mentioned in part one, back in 1983, HMA, that's the company that is doing all of the health care and managing all the blood donation for the Arkansas prisons. They've just been shut down, but then they got reopened after some people who were close to the administration got put in positions in both the prison board and at HMA.
Oh, and HMA is Health Management Associates Incorporated. What do we always say about innocuous names, right? Yeah, that's the worst thing ever.
Yes, they're just killing people. You really want to just invest in a company called Murder Co.
Because Murder Co. probably just produces like cat food or something.
They're founded by Janine Murder. Yeah, Janine Murder.
She's a great cat food scientist. Of the New Hampshire murders.
Of the New Hampshire murders. Yeah, the Grimmitt State.
As I mentioned in part one, in 1983, HMA had sold a bunch of tainted blood plasma for inmates who were known to be positive for hepatitis. 38 units of blood to be exact.
Now, one unit of blood, there's actually varies because it depends on like how it's – it's like roughly a pint, right? That's what you should keep in mind in your head when you're hearing about a unit of blood. Now, in the grand scheme of things, 38 pints or so of blood that's tainted doesn't sound like a lot, maybe.
However, as I stated in the last episode, all of these are being mixed with tens of thousands of other blood donations. And so these 38-ish pints-ish of tainted blood

can wind up being turned into medicine

for tens of thousands of people, right?

Because any given dose of the plasma being given

to hemophiliacs as factor eight

would be made from the blood of as many as 60,000 donors.

And just one tainted donor can spoil the batch.

So that's great. So from just 38 pints of donated blood, at least 40,000 doses of dangerous tainted medicine were made and shipped overseas.
At least. Probably significantly more than that.
Many made their way into the hands of hemophiliacs who required regular injections of factor eight. In 1985, the same year that Clinton's state cops cleared the company of most wrongdoing, a UK hemophilia sufferer named Peter Longstaff tested positive for HIV.
Now, because of the way this all works, we don't know that Peter's tainted plasma came from Arkansas prison inmates, right? Because you can't. They're just mixing it.
They're not keeping track of, here's every individual whose blood is in this batch of factor eight, right? But he'd been taking blood products, including factor eight and factor four since the seventies. And by then, Arkansas was a huge part of the US blood economy.
And the odds that blood from Cummins prison made it into his body are about 100%, right? Just given the way things worked at that time. His brother also suffered from hemophilia and his brother, Stephen Longstaff would be infected in 1986 and became one of the first people to die of AIDS in the UK.
Given the hysteria at the time, this meant not just that the Longstaffs weren't just dealing with the fact that two of, you know gotten sick and in 86 one of them died, but it meant that they also became the targets of mob panic. Per The Guardian, During Stephen's final days in hospital, the windows had to be blacked out to prevent people taking pictures.
On the day of the funeral, the family house was daubed with paint, which read, AIDS, get out of here. devastating to the family.
She, his mother said, Pete himself recalled being rescued from his house by his GP and the police because there was a mob outside trying to get him because he had HIV. Jesus.
So when we talk about how many people are getting sick, it's not just that they're getting a deadly or potentially deadly disease that changes or ends their life. It's also they're dealing with this kind of shit because that is where the culture is at the time.
You know, the secondary infection. Right.
Of a mass outbreak. Yeah.
Of dickishness. Yeah.
So we could say then. Yeah.
We could say then that not only is this family being targeted unfairly through some groundswell of mob rule, but they're being targeted at one of the worst possible moments of their lives. Yeah, I remember when I was in school in like the 90s, we had like school lectures about how like, yeah, there was a kid with HIV, I think because he had gotten it through a blood donation.
And you could still use the water fountain that he used. It wasn't a danger to you, you know.
Which might sound silly to us now. It sounds wild now.
But no, I remember this. Yeah.
You were there. Yeah.
Just like you were there at the JFK assassination. We know.
You know, Robert. I know who was there.
And I know that he is currently, you know, a well-regarded U.S. politician.
But Bernard Montgomery Sanders has a lot of unanswered questions about that. That's all we need to say.
That's all we need to say. All right.
We're keeping it on air. Bernie, come find us.
Buy some catalytic converters. Yeah.
So HMA ultimately settled with the FDA over the blood recall that resulted from this. Their share of the liability was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Now, we don't know how much money HMA was making off of this program, in part because they weren't really required to let people... The regulations about this are like, you don't really need to say in the sense that most companies do.
But at least a couple of million dollars a year is probably a fair guess based on how, like what the company that takes over for them is going to make. Now, the state police investigation largely cleared the department of any serious wrongdoing in their plasma problem.
HMA was eventually given the go ahead to continue operating it with new safeguards in place. Thankfully, the growing panic over HIV and the news of what had happened to the longstaffs in the UK prompted some reexamination.
And even though they were allowed to continue in like 84, 85 doing this plasma donation program, in the summer of 1986, a hero emerged. And unfortunately, in this case, the hero was an insurance company.
But like HMA's insurance company, after they after they looked into the evidence was like, oh, absolutely not. No, you people are going to get us fucked.
Like, you're so reckless. We're dropping your asses.
Right. This meant that the Arkansas prison plasma donation program was again forced to shut down.

And this is going to lead to some of the most, I mean, less irresponsible actions than we've had so far. So one of the things that happens once HMA gets shut down by their insurer, the prison board, in which the guy we heard from last episode, Clinton aide Bobby Roberts, is a member of the board.
They actually, they might come to the conclusion that like that state police investigation might have been shit. And they hire an outside organization to do a better version of the internal investigation into what had happened.
Now, the group they picked was the Institute for Law and Policy Planning from Berkeley, California, which is a lot better than having the state police do it. But the subject of the investigation wasn't the plasma donation program itself.
It was just the behavior of HMA. So part of what they're doing here, it's good that we get this info, but part of what they're doing is like, well, we don't, we don't want to be like shitting on the prison system.
We want to make this company who we already can't work with anymore into a scapegoat. So they scoped in and cauterized the loop, essentially.
Right, exactly. Yes, yeah.
And this is how the paper concludes. HMA originally may have diverted the Department of Correction payments to support acquiring plasma centers or to other purposes that may well warrant further inquiry.
In any event, it was early in the five-year contract period that HMA established a pattern of contract shortfalls, and the ADC accepted them.

For HMA, this must all be viewed as profit-motivated business decision-making at best.

At worst, it calls for further inquiry.

So just like so many crimes are going on here.

Yeah.

Now, even though it has concluded this again, it's just blaming HMA.

So the people running the prison system still want to make money off of blood.

So the Arkansas Department of Corrections makes a deal with a new company, Pine Bluff Biological Products, a for-profit business.

And obviously one that's not going to continue the same problems.

These guys are finally going to be ethical. Finally.
On the up and up. On the up and up.
Someone doing blood money the right way. Yes, exactly.
Ethical. Just like the ethical blood diamonds that I wear in my all diamond chiffon.
I don't know what a chiffon is. Yeah, but yours is diamond encrusted.

That's the important part of the story.

Yes, and they're not blood diamonds.

They're blood plasma diamonds, which is much more ethical.

Think about it.

That's why I made my money off a platelet emerald mine.

Exactly, exactly.

Platelets make the best emeralds, I assume.

So, Roberts, Bobby Roberts would later allege of Pine Bluff Biological Products getting the new blood contract.

Quote, I think it was an insider Pine Bluff deal.

There's a lot of people. So, Roberts, Bobby Roberts would later allege of Pine Bluff Biological Products getting the new blood contract.
Quote, I think it was an insider Pine Bluff deal. Those were companies set up specifically for doing business with the ADC.
Basically, people who were running the Department of Corrections went to rich, you know, entrepreneur friends of theirs and were like, here's what you need to do to set up a company to like make this work, right? Now, I know what you're asking now. How much money was in this business for the prison system? And the answer is- Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Let me do it. Hey, Robert, how much money was in this for the prison system? The answer is less than you'd think.
Here's the Arkansas Times. According to Robert's records, PBBP reported collecting an average of 960 units of plasma a week in fiscal year 1986, calculated a conserving selling rate of $50 a unit that volume of plasma grossed to approximately $2.5 million that year.
According to PBBP's contract, the ADC was to receive $5 for every unit of plasma collected. So here's how the numbers looked in a year when the median income in Arkansas was half of what it is today and when the scourge of contaminated blood products was being felt around the world.
Of PBBPs, $2.5 million in annual gross sales, $350,000 went to pay inmates their $7 a unit fees. The state of Arkansas collected $249,600 for prison operations, and PBBP had gross revenues of almost 1.9 million.

Now, that sounds weirdly small for this.

First off, this is not all the money that's coming in through the program. But second, what's happening here is the state and the prisons are getting, you know, a little bit of this money.

And most of that prisoner money is also going back into the Department of Corrections because they're using it to buy things from the prisons. Most of the money is going to PBBP.
And again, this is a company that has been set up specifically to interface with the Department of Corrections, generally by people who had relationships with people in Arkansas government who were responsible for making these calls. So they basically created a free company to siphon off money from the prisons, right? That's kind of what's happened here.
Yeah, that's the question. I think all of us hearing this are going to be asking naturally, is this a cutout? Is this like a proxy to move or sluice some money through? That's kind of, that's an element of what is going on.
And there's also serious debates as to these numbers. This is what the Arkansas Times suggests.
There's a, Sophia Chase wrote for the William and Mary Business Law Review that the value of a unit of blood to the prison was about a hundred bucks. And the prison kept half of that as opposed to like $5 per unit.
So they may have, it may have been a lot more going into the system. The fact that the money on this is so unclear in its precise details is one of the things that's shady.
Soxophone. Yeah.
Detector. Now, even if, let's say it's about $2 million that PBBP is grossing.
Now, it's gross not yet net, but they effectively have almost no costs because they don't build their own facilities. They are using a plasmapheresis center built into Cummins prison for free.
That's part of the contract. The Department of Corrections handles all utilities and all janitorial work.
And it's also guards who are working, reaching out to prisoners to get them to sign on to the program and busing them to Cummins. And it's still a lot of inmates doing the work.
So really, PBBP is just skimming $2 million out of this program and handing it to some people who have connections to folks who are, you know, close to the ADC, right? Yeah. So as far as I can tell, all PBBP, the company did, was sell blood without checking to make sure it was safe and pocketed the money.
On paper, they were supposed to assume liability for all plasma products produced through this and ensure they provided staff to handle the draw and that those staff were licensed professionals who would check the product. But the ADC also kept giving them inmates to do blood draws and other work that by the text of the contract, professional PBBP employees ought only to have been doing.
Roberts described the PBBP looking at the inmates as, quote, sort of as little cows, right? You hear the description a lot that they're like, this is, these are, yeah, these are animals that we are mining for the products of their body. Now, by 1986, when PBBP starts, we are four years past the point where the U.S.
has essentially soft banned the use of domestic inmate blood. However, it continues to be used for export products.
Cutter Laboratories, which is one of the companies involved in the nuts and bolts parts of turning whole blood into like blood products, publishes an internal memo around this time that highlights the attitude many in the industry had to the idea of excluding prison plasma donations. There are no data to support the emotional arguments that prison plasma collected from adequately screened prisoners is bad.
To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a sop or a gratuity to the gay rights movement and would presage further pressure to exclude plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor. Say it one more time.
Just say it one more time. Yeah.
Yeah. To exclude such plasma from manufacture of our coagulation product would only be a sop or gratuity to the gay rights movement and would presage further pressure to exclude plasma collected from the Mexican border and the paid donor.
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Will someone make less money if we have to use blood that isn't taken coercively by people who have an incentive to lie about whether or not they're sick. And again, when I talk about there being a lot more money, like like what what pbp is making is the initial money for selling this plasma right and both the plasma and the whole blood that's coming in through these donation programs are worth a shitload more once you spin them out into the different blood factors right so this there's a whole higher level of profit that these companies like cutter are making right um? Likewise, the US has said we're not using this stuff domestically for medicine.
And likewise, our foreign friends in the UK and Canada don't allow blood from prison inmates to be used in medicine. But a system had been devised to ensure plausible deniability.
The blood that came out of Cummins and other donor programs in the U.S. was sold to Continental Pharma Crino in Montreal, and this major blood broker resells the whole blood in plasma all around the world.
And it also sells to a Toronto-based company, Conant Laboratories, who effectively played the role of blood launderer and sent this tainted blood to the Canadian Red Cross. The laundering process was so effective that, as Sophia Chase writes, in at least one case, the blood was sent back to the United States.
So we are also using tainted blood in the U.S. from inmates, even though we're not supposed to be, because it's being sold to Canada and then sold back to us.
Yeah. Excuse me, waiter, send this blood back.
Send this one back across the border to our good friends. Also, blood launderer as a job.
This is blood laundering. Yeah.
We're in the wrong business. Yeah.
Oh, there's so much money laundering blood. Oh, man.
Do you ever think about that? Mm-hmm. I do.
I do. You know, I have a shitload of blood in my it.
People always say that. Yeah.
I keep it in my basement. I don't know if it needs to be refrigerated, but, you know, make me an offer folks.
If you need a shitload of blood, I got it. Cool.
Store is cool. Blood stored in a dark place.
Cool. The cool zone is getting into the blood business.
So you're legally not allowed to ask me where it came from.

It's illegal for you guys to ask Robert that. It's so important we can't know.
Yeah, it's also important to realize that the fewer questions you ask, the bigger of a price break you get. That's right.
And that seems to be an unfortunate truth as this, we could even call it a sort of blood economy begins to arise. That's right.
That's right. And speaking of the economy, I don't know if our sponsors sell blood, but they sell other stuff.
So go buy it and then give me your blood. Do you say data or data? Well, at my house, we say data.

And for the longest time, I thought paying a fortune on my monthly data plan was just normal. That was until I found out about Mint Mobile and their premium wireless plans that start at just $15 a month.
So, say buh-bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw-dropping monthly bills, and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile's here to rescue you.
All plans come with high-speed data, or data, your choice, and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contracts.
Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. No matter how you say it, don't overpay for it.

Shop data plans at mintmobile.com slash behind.

That's mintmobile.com slash behind.

Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month 5-gigabit plan required,

equivalent to $15 a month.

New customer offer for first three months only,

then full-price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
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, dickless version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, Dickless 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 Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
I'm excited to share my podcast with you, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. This week, I'm talking to the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, about how he led his team through unprecedented times to create, test, and distribute a COVID vaccine all in less than a year.
It becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy and to do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof, like Ello or Allbirds or Skims, sure, you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing.
But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business, making selling simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.
Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And the not-so-secret secret, with ShopPay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going...
So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the

same checkout Allbirds uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash try, all lowercase.
Go to shopify.com slash try to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash try.
we're back so evenBP, this new company, the same problems persisted. Prisoners continue to be involved in running the plasma program.
They regularly overbleed each other because it means more money for them. And neither the prison system nor the company has a financial interest in stopping that.
Records are regularly falsified and destroyed. Earlier in these episodes,

we quoted from Clinton friend and prison board member Bobby Roberts. He's been something of a

whistleblower about the program, but just to an extent. When the FDA published a study alleging

that prison plasma was likelier to be tainted with blood than plasma donated elsewhere,

Roberts told reporters from the Arkansas Times this, I deny the premise. I disagree that prison

plasma blood was more dangerous than it was coming out of the for-profit centers in the free world. Out there, anybody could bleed anybody.
But the problem isn't everyone has blood. The problem is that it's not being checked and there's a lot of incentives to lie when you're sick when you have no other way of making money because prison.
Right. Like also, you can't just say I disagree with the premise.
Yeah. It's like the FDA.
You're not you're Bobby Roberts. For one thing, your name's Bobby Roberts.
I ultimately immediately I'm less likely to take you seriously about medical science. Both of your names are the same.
I just I love the idea. Bob Robb.
Of Bob Robb pulling a hot tag base on something where, you know, like this guy might get arrested with a bunch of guns with the serial numbers filed off. And they're like, hey, we got you with a bunch of guns, you know, in your Honda Civic.
And he's like, officer, I disagree with the premise. I disagree with the premise.
That article continues to summarize Roberts's argument. Roberts bases his confidence in the state's plasma program on the fact that unlike downtown plasma centers, the ADC had medical records on every inmate who participated.
It knew who was safe to bleed, he says, and who wasn't. can we take a can we take a second to also come on man the use of the word bleed like this yeah yeah it's just so safe to bleed right to bleed yes yeah and he's right the prison has records oh good and it often knows when people have blood-borne.
The issue is that they don't care. Per the paper written by Sophia Chase, multiple witnesses to the events claim that the Plasma Center accepted some donations from prisoners known to fail the required qualifications.
A previous inmate, Louis Sorrells, described the conditions at the prison. You had prisoners bribing prisoners, prisoners bribing officials, officials offering certain deals for them to bleed for extra money or drugs.
Soros himself passed away from hepatitis C shortly after the interview. He became infected with this disease during his time at Cummins Prison.
And because of the previous scandals under HMA, there are more outside investigations into the plasma program after this point. A few years after PBBP takes over, an FDA inspector reports them for poor screening procedures and record keeping.

The prison officials who manage the program for PBBP were also accused of using prison guards to recruit inmates.

Despite this, in an interview with a local reporter, prison medical director John Bias, who is like, you know, like the medical director of the prison, right? Said this, we plan to stick with the plasma program to the last day, to the last drop we're able to sell. Wow.
Okay. Well, why? Given all of the bad stuff, why? It sounds like one of those things where the public wider audience is somehow different from the specific audience this guy is speaking to.
Yeah, maybe. He might be given some guarantees.
Yeah, yeah. Now, in 1991, a company from New York takes the contract from PBVP, and they continue to mine prisoners for blood plasma until 1994.
By this point, not only was the HIV crisis more fully understood, but the consequences of all those years of tainted blood getting shotgunned out onto the world market had become undeniable, and this is where we get to the body count. Best as we can tell, more than 1,000 Canadian hemophiliacs were dosed with tainted blood from Cummins prison alone.
During this time frame, 42,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis C and thousands more with HIV through tainted plasma, often including plasma imported from Cummins. Current estimates expect about 7,000 total deaths of Canadian citizens from contaminated blood sold by the U.S.
during this period, about two 9-11s, a little more. And to be clear, these are all, for everyone listening, these are all innocent people who are taking – Easily preventable deaths too, yes.
Easily preventable deaths. Also, this is medicine that they need to live.
Yes. Yes.
And the shockwaves in Canada. Canada takes substantial action here, right? The Canadian Red Cross has to declare bankruptcy and is no longer allowed to collect blood as a result of the fallout of this.
The Canadian government launched a commission in 1995 to trace the blood that had poisoned so many of their citizens, which is how we first learned that Canada's blood supply had been tainted by blood from sick U.S. prison inmates, right? They trace a lot of it back to Cummins.
Conant Laboratories, which is the Canadian company that's like making the blood product, was obviously proven negligent in all this, largely because they had avoided checking any of the plasma collection sites themselves and had relied on FDA records, which were also deficient. Subsequent investigation showed that Arkansas, it's a little bit like, if you've heard the story of like the rust shooting, right? Where like the first AD, assistant director, was supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty.
Alongside the armorer was also supposed to check the gun to see if it was empty. And the first AD didn't really do a check because he assumed the armorer had done it, right? And the armorer had not done it.
It's like that, right? Like Connacht was just like, the FDA has probably got it. We don't need to spend any money checking.
And like, they really did. The FDA didn't have it, you know? Subsequent investigations showed that Arkansas prison blood was a significant contributor to Canada's hep C and HIV crisis in this period, and that both U.S.
blood brokers and the FDA failed to inform Canadian companies where the blood they were buying had come from, and that much of it was being sent from facilities which had already been linked to tainted blood sales. There have been attempts at lawsuits over this, but the difficulties of carrying out such a suit cross-border have mostly stymied the efforts of Canadian hemophiliacs to get justice.

As I discussed earlier, a good deal of the tainted blood from the U.S. also went to Great Britain, where it helped cause what Lord Robert Winston described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS.

Oh.

All thanks to our American friends. Oh, good.
The worst. The young upstarts.
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, our shitty cousins. Yeah.
Crack the bag once again. Yeah.
From that article by Sophia Chase, most of the victims believe the blood and clotting factors they were using came from British donors. The possibility that the blood might have been imported did not even occur to them, much less the prospect that it might not meet British health standards.
The disaster left 4,670 British hemophiliacs infected with hepatitis C, and 1,243 of those were also infected with HIV. About 2,000 have died at this point, right? Also, many of them spread diseases to partners and children.
We'll never fully have an understanding of the exact cons, but at least 2,000 dead. And again, there were like, you know, investigations into this as well.
Quote, it ultimately determined that A, a significant burden of responsibility for tainted blood provided to British hemophiliacs rests on American suppliers of factor VIII concentrate. Now, due to the way things were done at the time, it was not possible to determine how many of those deaths were directly linked to Cummins prison.
Again, there have been changes in how stuff is reported to try and make it easier to trace back tainted blood, but that didn't exist at the time. We know at least three, right? So we know it was happening.
It's got to be thousands more than that, right?

Because it's incredibly hard to actually trace this, right?

In part because one of the things they found when they realized how many British people

had gotten HIV and hepatitis and were dying, they found that most of the records for blood

transactions to import blood into the UK had been shredded in the early 1990s.

Accidentally. Oops.
Oops. Oops.
Surely nothing shady there. Right, right.
Have you ever found yourself in that situation, folks? Oh, gosh. Whoopsie doodles.
Yeah. Whoops.
You just trip with a stack of papers and fall toward the shredder. I'm always shredding medical documents.
That's like 80% of my day job is shredding medical documents from the UK. I don't even know what they're about.
You know, they just send them to me in boxes and I just shred. That's how you and I got started before this whole podcasting thing.
We would just hang out and throw some stuff into shredders and high five each other. That's the future of media, shredding British medical paperwork.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were entirely wrong, but we had too much blood back then.
We did have way too much blood. Yeah.
So it may seem baffling that there was not more oversight given the way things work with the – especially at this point worked at the NHS.

But the blood export industry in the UK was considered uniquely favored, right, which means they were exempt from some of the same oversight because number one, and this is the same in Canada, not nearly enough British people or Canadians were donating blood. They just didn't have enough.

And the U.S. was considered the gold standard planet-wide for blood distribution because no one else could gather and disseminate anywhere.
Again, 70% of the blood products worldwide coming from the U.S. No one else was even close.
So everyone is just like, they must have this shit figured out, right? Like, no.

But yeah, but because our system was the largest by far, everyone relied on it and became the global standard and other national healthcare agencies and companies just sort of assumed

that US regulators had our shit together because the only other option was to not have enough

blood.

Now, that's the bulk of this story. But before we close out here, I should talk about something.
So there is apparently an exceptional documentary made about all this called Factor 8, the Arkansas prison blood scandal. It was made by Kelly Duda, a filmmaker and investigative journalist who won a Peabody Award in 2003 for a Japanese documentary about the cover-up by the government of a hep C epidemic.
She spent eight years researching and five years filming this movie, which prompted an international response. And even she gets called into a criminal trial in Naples for a company accused of selling tainted blood products to Italian citizens.
It's supposed to be excellent. I haven't seen it, and I wanted to.
It is not available anywhere online that I can find.

When you look on, like, Reddits and stuff, it's always blamed on the Clintons, right? Like, they stopped this documentary from getting out. I know that Duda has alleged she received, like, harassment and stuff while she was making the documentary.
That said, when you talk about the bad things the Clintons did, this is, especially Bill, an incredibly powerful man who was involved in a lot of shady stuff. There's also a whole industry of right-wing content dedicated to lying about shit, including the Clinton murder list and stuff.
It's just nonsense, right? So it's difficult to parse a lot of stuff out. Now, there is no doubting that Bill Clinton deserves a massive degree of blame for the Arkansas blood scandal because he was the governor and because he put people who were close to him directly in positions to manage the program.
No argument, period, that he does not deserve a meaningful amount of blame for this, right? But a lot of these other allegations, right? Like the fact that are the Clintons locking down access?

Have they used their influence it's like i mean it's not a powerful people do that with documentaries but also a lot of the time i i'm doing episodes i found out there's a 20 year old documentary about it and i can't find that documentary because it's not on streaming. That just happens with media.

So like is the likeliest thing the Clintons locked?

I don't I don't I have no evidence of that.

Right.

I've had this happen to a bunch of documentaries over the years.

That said, I would love to see this documentary.

So if you've got it, hit us up.

And I don't know.

Someone put it on fucking streaming.

Now, the most credible allegations that I've heard when it comes to like

Thank you. hit us up.
And I don't know, someone put it on fucking streaming. Now, the most credible allegations that I've heard when it comes to like, you know, the corruption here is that money from this blood program was used to provide positions to people as political favors where they could profit while doing very little.
And it's certainly true that the State Department of Corrections doesn't make a ton from the blood program, right? However, other people in and around the state government make an unknown amount of money acting as grease around HMA and then PBBP's wheels here. One example is Leonard Dunn.
That is the guy who gets brought in to run HMA right around the time of the first blood scandal. He's a banker.
A state police investigator wrote that Dunn had advised him, quote, he was close to Governor Clinton as well as a majority of state politicians presently in office. Mr.
Dunn explained that he was very fond of politics. Dunn added that he was the financial portion of the corporation as well as the political arm.
Despite this, he also claimed he never took an active role in the company on a day-to-day basis. Okay, man.
Oh, sure. Sure.
Yeah, yeah. Good story, bro.
But Dunn does handle when HMA loses the contract briefly, he is the guy negotiating with the corrections board so that it can keep taking and selling plasma. And since his company had just paid out to the FDA for letting tainted blood out of the country, you might imagine these would be difficult negotiations.
But the main result of these negotiations was that Dunn, in order to get the corrections board to agree, agreed to bring in an ombudsman to act as a compliance coordinator to ensure HMA followed the rules going forward. This ombudsman was Richard Mays, a Little Rock judge who had been appointed by Governor Clinton.
His job at HMA was described by the state police as a bribe.

Because again, he's not really doing anything.

They're just like, yeah, just give another guy who like we owe a favor a job and pay him some money.

He doesn't have to do much.

Yeah.

Let's make it official with our bud.

Yeah.

Now you're an alms bud.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Now the specific choice to bring on Dunn seems to have been made by the Arkansas Board

I'm going to go for the next provider chosen. And Walker and Clinton jointly suggested Mays, right? That's what Walker claims.
Obviously, he's in trouble here. But the fact that this guy who Clinton appoints as a judge gets this bribe job, I don't think Clinton had nothing to do with that.
To quote from Susie Parker's article, HMA President Dunn told investigators, Dunn stated that Walker advised him that Mays was black, a plus in a system where most of the inmates are black, had good qualifications and was an outstanding attorney, according to investigators notes. I like the order of operations.
Yes. With those commendations.
Yes. You know, like, oh, and third, he's pretty good.
He's a good lawyer. Yeah.
Yeah. He's all right at that one.
But first. Yeah.
Now, obviously, I'm not saying he's not a good attorney, but he doesn't have qualifications to monitor a blood plasma donation program. Oh, jeez.
Yeah. That's like saying, you know, this guy's a great helicopter pilot.
Let's put him in charge of making sure all the hearts we put in people are working. He doesn't know how to do that.
Like, yeah, he's good at something. You haven't seen him on the bird.
You know what I mean? Man, the way this guy flies, he can really pick out a good kidney. You can just, it's something in the eyes.
You know, it's a vibe. Simply not the same job.
Now, there are other allegations of kickbacks and bribery at high levels in the system. Mike Galster was a medical practitioner who worked in Cummins Prison during the height of the HMA days, and he later wrote a fictionalized novel about his experiences and claimed that he had to leave the company after an HMA associate demanded he give some of his earnings to him in order to keep his job.
Quote, the way Arkansas works is that once you are working within the system, the people in charge make it clear that it is a privilege to have to work within a system in order to get the stuff done that he wants to get done, right? And the fact that that system existed before and after him does not exempt him from responsibility for participating in it. Nor exonerate, to be quite honest.
And I love the point that we're bringing up here about how easy it is to heap opprobrium on someone that you already don't care for or disagree with. But just like the soul-crushing thing where someone you hate makes a really good point, objectively, you also have to have that moment where even someone you might like does really just unclean evil shit for a federal judge to say there are evil people involved.
Yes. And it's this, the issue of both like, it is important to hold Clinton's, I mean, he didn't, no one held his feet to the, but it would have been important for them to have done this as a result of this.
It's also important for it not to be what a lot of people tried to make it where it's like, well, this is purely a Clinton scandal. No, I mean, this is like an Arkansas scandal.
It's like a blood industry scandal. This is a lot of very important.
And if you're picking out one of the threads involved in this scandal, then you're ignoring all of the other ones. And it becomes clear, OK, well, you hate Governor Clinton.
But if a governor you didn't hate had been doing all of the same things you wouldn't have given a shit you know like yeah you would have been like you know people uh like what yeah these are systemic issues and we both need to blame and punish individual people responsible for them and understand how the systemic part plays into it so that we don't just put like well no i like this governor so i'm just not going to pay attention to what's being done in the Arkansas prisons anymore. You know, maybe the problem is monetizing everything.
Yeah. Maybe the problem is monetizing everything.
Like those early reports said, if you make blood donation be entirely driven by money, there's a lot of issues you have to deal with. The other issue is like, well, then how do we get all the blood we need? Because like we don't have enough.
There's never enough. enough.
How do we get the blood we need? Yeah. There's never an organ surplus.
Right. Right.
Yeah. And so there's a degree to which like, as much as we're critiquing parts of this, there are certain things I know that we shouldn't have been doing, like running a blood program the way they did at Cummins Prison.
Oh, come on. But when it comes to like, how do we get enough blood? Well, nobody's figured that out yet.
I don't know. Nobody's figured that out except for Robert Evans, creator of Behind the Bastards, who has several jars of, we'll call it gently used vintage blood.
Gently used, blinted blood, maybe a little bit of lamb's blood in there. I might have thinned it out with some coconut milk.
You're good. You're good.
Take it. You're good.
No refunds. Also contains X amount of ethanol.
You know who else doesn't give refunds? Who's that? The sponsors of this podcast. That we're hoping to keep, Robert.
Maybe they give refunds. I don't know.
I never check. We're back.
So a good deal of the information in this article comes from a 1998 piece published by Arkansas investigative journalist Susie Parker. She also published an article on the Whitewater scandal for the New York Times, which was a big scandal for the Clintons while he was in office that like is incredibly boring today because political scandals have gotten so much worse.
Like it's so quaint that like, oh man, remember when people were upset about these like shady business dealings the president might be tied to? Good Lord. Guys, this dude may have made a couple hundred thousand dollars illegally.
So let's rebuild those guillotines. Anyway, the president said he's a king.
It's just things are a lot worse. I'm not saying Whitewater was okay.
I'm just saying things are so much worse now. Susie has worked for a number of publications and she has a particular fixation on Arkansas politics and the Clintons.
Today, she runs a local independent publication called The Reckoning and she she is quite conservative, right? She is a right wing, at least similarly more sympathetic to that. I think she does portray Clinton's involvement as like more direct and puppet

mastery than it was. I think this was something Clinton acceded to, both because he gained some

benefit from like, you know, giving some of these positions to people close to him. And because not

messing with this allowed him to do it was like a politics was a trade for him. Right.
Whereas like the other people running the board of corrections and running these, there were, these were the people who were like directly setting up the system like this. Again, I think Clinton knew quite a bit of how bad this was and made some choices here, but he's not the puppet master, right? Now, one of the issues here comes that alongside some strong connections, which again, don't imply that Clinton operated this program, but do imply that he deserves quite a lot of blame.
Or at least willfully ignorant. Yes.
There's also some specious allegations. For example, Galster, that former doctor, claims that Vince Foster was hired to squash the state investigation.

Now, this was true, and Vince Foster is a very close Clinton associate.

If this is true, that investigation happened

and, in fact, described some of what was going on as bribery,

and then there's an independent review ordered by the prison board,

which had Clinton allies on it.

So I don't know how much I believe that this is like a big deal,

but the reason this is seen as a smoking gun

Thank you. independent review ordered by the prison board, which had Clinton allies on it.
So I don't know, I don't know how much I believe that this is like a big deal. But the reason this is seen as a smoking gun, right, by some people is that in July of 1993, after Governor Clinton became President Clinton, Vince Foster shot himself to death in Washington, DC.
Foster had discussed his depression with his sister over some time. And he was at that moment in a lot of trouble over a totally different controversy with the White House travel office.
And there's no evidence of anything here other than that Vince was a serial political operator who was involved in some shady shit and got disgraced and who killed himself because he didn't want to live with the after effects, right? And, you know, that also the shit he was in to the extent that it was shady is very common among people who are Arkansas politicos. Right.
But Vince's death has become a cornerstone of some of the more unhinged parts of the anti-Clinton movement. You'll hear allegations that like he was either murdered by the Clintons or that he killed himself because of the blood scandal.
Right. The Clintons had him shot in order to cover this blood scandal up.
And again, it wasn't covered up. There was a documentary on it.
People didn't care enough, but it wasn't, you know, it got out. And the reality is that the blood scandal didn't have an impact on Bill and Hillary's lives or political careers, not in a real massive way.
And I can't, in fact, believe that people as connected as they are, you know, have contacts in the entertainment industry. But I also I just don't see the evidence that this destroyed them or that this was that dangerous to them.
In fact, in 1992, Peter Longstaff, who tested positive for HIV back in 1995 after receiving blood from U.S. donors, tested positive for hepatitis C.
And this was the same year that Clinton ran for presidential election.

The Arkansas Times writes, quote, His former chief of staff, Betsy Wright, sent a memo titled Prison Positives. That memo mentioned four points, including education into prison by Bill Clinton.
But the first point Wright listed was run cheapest system in the country. And so you kind of get, even in 92, the thing that like the scandal here

is not on their front burner.

Their front burner, still for him in 92,

after it's very clear how bad a lot of this is,

was like, no, the prison system was cheap.

Let's throw that in a bullet point list.

You know, it's a thing to run on, right?

Keeping costs down.

Keeping costs down. Keeping costs down.

Is the idea.

Yeah, fairly normal evil.

Fairly normal politics evil as opposed to like incredibly shady conspiracy evil. That's my opinion on the matter.
Well, I hear you there, too, because there's there's this devilishly tempting draw to to find a political force you disagree with or you already don't care for and then assign them super villainous agency where the you know, the result is without being too controversial. the result is is you ultimately have to ask yourself, is there any such thing as a completely clean POTUS? And what does it take to play that game? Yeah.
And also just like, perhaps if we keep, if the focus of all of these problems is like, ah, this is – I can use this huge systemic issue that a lot of people deserve to go down for to attack this one guy. That's all I'm really interested in.
I'm not interested in better treatment for prisoners. I'm not interested in a safer blood treatment system, right? And likewise, if you're – and to the same extent that like Bill's only interest in what happened in the prison system during his time was I need a bullet point of things that I can run on.
Right. And like, yeah, I put some educational programs in system was the cheapest, you know, that it's ever been.
Bada bing, bada boom. I'm done thinking about the prisons in the state I run, you know, like all of these are parts of the, the, the, the, why all of this kind of shit will keep happening.

Yes.

And that is, I think one of our, look, I know it's your show, but I think that's one of the key takeaways is it is, it is tempting again to look at the headline, to put a face on a problem. Right now I'm mad.
Insert individual here. Yeah.
The real problems are systemic and have always been and shall always be slow. Be so.
And with that, I got to tell you, it's a question that's been on my mind for both of these episodes. Robert, do you want to do you want to like buy some blood? Yes.
Oh, my God. Yes.
know i gotta i want to make sure yeah well i have any idea where the blood comes from or what is in it even better bro you're not buying it we do a subscription service oh shit awesome awesome you know you're well we say leasing it yeah yeah i'll lease the blood i'll give some back. You know, we got to have blood leasing has to be on the organ lease.
I mean, we're all going to be doing our best for the next several decades to like recreate some of like the silliest movies from the 1990s. I think Repo Man's next.
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited You have to come back on Stuff that I want you

Or you've never been on that one

Come back on stuff that I want you, or you've never been on that one.

Come back on ridiculous history while we can still call it history.

Right.

Yeah.

I feel like the rent of blood is just like a sequel to Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Jordan got us again.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

Anyway, rent some blood.

Have a great day. Jordan Peele's Get Out.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jordan got us again. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh. Anyway, rent some blood.
Have fun. I don't know why I ended on that, Mark.
What do you mean? I mean, you kind of did a plug. Yeah, Ben, plug some plugs, please.
Oh, sure. Other than Rent of Blood, which is clearly our main focus for both of these episodes,

please check out Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, which applies critical thinking to allegations of conspiracy. Please check out Ridiculous History, where you can hear our own friend Robert Evans.
Robert, pause, Evans. You like that? Just check it.
Yes. Social security number on the, uh, on the show a couple of times.
Uh,

moop, moop. like that just check it yes uh social security number beep on the uh on the show a couple of times uh most importantly uh most importantly i think you guys plug something i'm just throwing the ball over the court here yeah just doing like a half time go for it you know what i mean yeah half court find the documentary factor eight so i can watch it that's what i'm gonna plug somebody's gotta have it out there shout out to kelly duda by the way for standing tall in italian court that's a true story good work uh anyway that's the episode behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.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.