Iranians sell kidneys on Instagram to survive economic hardship

https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/2023/07/14/iranians-sell-kidneys-on-instagram-to-survive-economic-hardship/

by ryzvonusef • 3 years ago

82 76 3 years ago

ryzvonusef2• 3 years ago

    > Iran is the only country in the world where selling a kidney in legal.

    > Since the 1980s, the government has offered a fixed payment of 10 million rials (about $236) and subsidised health insurance to donors it matches with a person in need of a transplant, but many people head to the black market to bid for a better price.

    > On a well-known street near Tehran's Valiasr Square, walls are littered with signs advertising organs for sale, with sellers listing their blood type, age and phone number next to listings for livers, kidneys and corneas.

    > Keyhan, 39, said he “can’t count” how many people have contacted him to buy his kidney, which he has advertised on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, where some organ-selling channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.

seertaak• 3 years ago

That's difficult to read. I can only imagine how desperate BOTH sellers and buyers must be.

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

Very good point, up until know I hadn't considered the buyer. In my mental model they just collected kidneys.

But if course this is a huge spend because they too need this transaction.

Part of me wonders the quality of the match, and surgery.

I imagine the middle men make all the money

thatguy09002• 3 years ago

239$ sounds insanely low

dumdumchan• 3 years ago

That's twice the average yearly salary. Still pretty low though.

farhadhf• 3 years ago

The exchange rate used to get to the $236 amount is the "official" exchange rate stated by the government which even the government itself doesn't use. 10 million rials is $20.28 based on the real exchange rate used by literally everyone inside the country (see bonbast.com for the real rates - also, as an aside, "bonbast" means deadend in Farsi, which aptly describes the current economical situation in Iran).

For context, the minimum wage is $152 per month (around 75,182,000 rials).

The economy has gone to shit in the past 10 years. The minimum wage was around $425/month, or $2.4/hour back then, compared to $0.86/hour now.

The Rail has lost much of its value since then but the salaries haven't increased enough to cover the brutal inflation, resulting in extreme poverty for the majority of the population and situations like the one explained in the article.

xwdv2• 3 years ago

Wonder if there is a startup opportunity in being some kind of organ broker.

dekken_• 3 years ago

yeah it might look a little something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ppw5yTa3uk

thatguy09002• 3 years ago

This is exactly what I thought of

CodeWriter23• 3 years ago

We should definitely seek rent from these desperate people.

DoctorOW• 3 years ago

This is the most capitalist thing I've ever seen.

ftyers• 3 years ago

James Mickens came up with tooth.ie, where poor people rich in teeth can donate for a market-determined price to rich people poor in teeth.

cumshitpiss• 3 years ago

(YC S24) lifeline - we're disrupting the grassroots medical industry by connecting donaters and buyers directly

getmeinrn6• 3 years ago

The only startup opportunity you should be thinking about is how to reduce this situation from existing in the first place.

xwdv2• 3 years ago

Solving the root problem is outside the realm of startups. You must know the difference between problems that have political solutions and those which are primarily solvable through business activity.

In this case, if a platform existed that made it easy to connect donors with people in need, organized the transplant with reputable surgeons, provided insurance, and guaranteed the donor or their family were suitably compensated, then I imagine this would be far better than whatever black market horrors go on now.

A person should be allowed body autonomy – it’s their body, their choice. If you want to sell one of your spare organs such as a kidney, or maybe all your organs if you’re planning to euthanize, that should be your right.

Raising a family out of deep poverty will always take luck or sacrifice, there is no other way out.

seatac762• 3 years ago

Such a sociopathic take.

ROTMetro• 3 years ago

When I was in prison I was approached about creating an app to sell/buy kidneys for third world countries by a guy with really good connections. I was like traffic in human body parts? Yeah no.

Then the next app old boy wanted help with was 'arranged marriage' in countries that practice that where it was more of a bride auction marketplace. So now straight human trafficking? Again pass.

He finally settled on a project where he and his son arrange for people overseas to come study in the USA. What? How do you go from human trafficking to something harmless like that? They have to live/stay on his properties so he was directing money straight to himself, and after they got to the USA his 'associates' coerced them into signing contracts to work for his companies for X years. So basically human trafficking again, and sanctioned and sponsored by these peoples home country (whom he had connections within and who was paying for these people to study overseas). Now that I'm thinking about this I should probably look into if there is a way to report this.

Smart dude with lots of money but he just couldn't not be shady AF. He thought all of these were perfectly legit things and was surprised when I didn't.

zodiakzz• 3 years ago

Can you name the country please?

getmeinrn6• 3 years ago

Yeah I would delete this post and 100% report what you know to the authorities. Not to sound dramatic but peoples lives could literally be at stake.

popcalc2• 3 years ago

Were you cellmates with Paul Le Roux?

popcalc2• 3 years ago

The arranged marriage thing peaked my interest. If someone knows of an app/platform dealing with that, I'd be very curious to see it.

raybb• 3 years ago

Remind me of the 2010 movie Repo Men which is about someone with the job to reposes organs from people who can't pay the bills on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Men

treeman79• 3 years ago

Then there is the forced organ Harvesting in China. Need a new heart that’s a match. No need to wait. Politically inconvenient Donors are dying to meet demands.

https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forc...

LatteLazy2• 3 years ago

No one has ever found any actual evidence for that though. There are just people repeating each other claims as sources or citing poorly understood stats...

michaelmcdonald• 3 years ago

I don't know, this seems pretty convincing to me:

https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forc...

seatac762• 3 years ago

Just heartbreaking

renewiltord• 3 years ago

A regulated organ trade is good. We have provenance management here in the US already and the lifetime risks for a kidney donor are dwarfed by other jobs like underwater engineering.

1234letshaveatw• 3 years ago

Right- is it really more ethical to let recipients die on a waiting list?

mooreds• 3 years ago

If you want a deeper dive into this, here's a podcast episode from 2015 about the Iranian kidney market: https://www.econtalk.org/tina-rosenberg-on-the-kidney-market...

diimdeep• 3 years ago

What is up with journalists including this one[1] publishing only negative sentiment news stories ? If we could make The "Sentiment Meter" that measures the sentiment neutrality of news publications based on past journalist publications, they would sink in this rating.

[1] https://www.thenationalnews.com/topics/Author/holly-johnston...

MattRix• 3 years ago

Why should sentiment be neutral, especially from a single journalist? It seems absurd to assume that there must be an equal amount of positive and negative things to cover.

tehwebguy• 3 years ago

Yeah, they should write an article about all the other countries were people don’t sell their kidneys!

NikolaNovak• 3 years ago

If you are e.g. A war correspondent and that's your job, you're probably going to have mostly negative sentiment stories. Similarly If you focus on reporting child abuse topics, similar. If your shtick is to embed yourself in poverty areas and bring true stories, it won't be lolipops and rainbows. Outside of journalism, same thing. There are jobs where you get exposed to wonderful things day in and day out, and there are jobs where you get exposed to bad sad stuff. and everything in between.

Particularly if your goal to be in journalism in the first place may be to change / improve the world, you might focus on things that need changing / improving.

Finally, outside of some very specific places, in a lot of the world things suck more than they don't.

I don't know if that answers your question or you had a different question / point to make?

hashstring• 3 years ago

Nauseating news… heartbreaking indeed.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

Are Iranians in especial need of kidneys for some reason compared to, say, Americans? Or do other countries have a more functioning donor network? Better results managing treatment with damaged kidneys/more readily available dialysis?

coderintherye• 3 years ago

Start from understanding that the list of people waiting on kidney donations in the United States is long, and the average wait time is 3-5 years. Some awaiting kidneys will die before getting a donated one.

If selling kidneys were legal in the United States then people would be buying and selling them here.

gre3• 3 years ago

...economic hardship partially caused by economic sanctions. Sanctions are literally war and illegal unless approved by the UN.

Sanctions on Iran: https://www.state.gov/iran-sanctions/

Ben Norton on the Iran sanctions: https://youtu.be/dN2oeSXHVMI?t=1343

esafak• 3 years ago

Do sanctions like this work? I imagine it would only serve to unite the people against the sanctioner.

edit: I realize from the responses that I assumed the goal was to cause the sanctioned government to fall. Of course there may be other goals.

KptMarchewa• 3 years ago

They do. They make the enemy nation poorer, in contrast to economic cooperation that makes them stronger - which US just started to see in China.

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Given examples like Cuba and the DPRK, it certainly doesn't seem to work.

ClarityJones2• 3 years ago

Sanctions are literally war and illegal unless approved by the UN.

Are you saying that war is illegal unless approved by the UN, or this specific means of war?

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Given that the UN's main job is supposedly to maintain peace, one would hope so.

gre3• 3 years ago

"According to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, only the UN Security Council has a mandate by the international community to apply sanctions (Article 41) that must be complied with by all UN member states (Article 2,2)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions

For the US, congress is supposed to approve of wars but that has not always happened either.

"It has been alleged that the War Powers Resolution has been violated in the past – for example, by George W. Bush invading Iraq in 2003 or by President Bill Clinton in 1999, during NATO bombing of Yugoslavia."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution

local_crmdgeon• 3 years ago

The UN is just an office building on First Ave. It has no actual power.

The USA can do whatever the fuck it wants, the UN has 0 jurisdiction over us.

ksajadi• 3 years ago

This is a false narrative. While true that the sanctions have pushed the value of IRR down, the lifting of sanctions, during Obama / Khatami era only fed the corrupt IRGC and its shadow economy. It is easy to think that people are being forced to sell kidneys because of the economic sanctions and as countries imposing the sanctions we are implicit in this, but the Iranian government and Khamenei are the main culprits here. They have the power and the means stop playing menace in the region, stop their proxy wars and move towards lifting of sanctions. There is a small but vocal Iranian backed lobby in the US (NIAC specifically) that is constantly pushing for the lifting of sanctions, even during the most brutal suppressions of the Iranian people by the government, peddling a narrative that the Iranians are dissatisfied with the economy and if the sanctions are lifted, all is going to be ok.

There is a shadow army, government and economy in Iran, created and tightly controlled by the office of the supreme leader, Khamenei and enforced by IRGC. They have a chokehold on the economy, imports and exports as well as almost exclusive control over critical foreign affairs. While lifting of sanctions will marginally reduce the pressure on the IRR in the short term, it will feed this cancerous growth which is not in the interest of the Iranian people and the world.

gromneer• 3 years ago

Bully nations must never be allowed to successfully weaponize starvation. Giving in to sanctions is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists. A terrible precedent to set.

tgv• 3 years ago

Sanctions are literally war

No, they aren't.

stunt• 3 years ago

They are and they do kill people and make them suffer! Just nobody will count civilian casualties.

I think they are terrible. Just look at how little inflation has affected society even in most resilient economies and rich countries. Angry and impatient people everywhere, shoplifting and all sort of theft and crime going up.

Sanctions are not designed to directly pressure elites and corrupt leaders. They probably benefit even more because everyone now relies on them to do any foreign business. Average investor can no longer do anything. Therefore, it gives more power to the sanctioned regime.

Sanctions are designed to inflict great suffering on ordinary people in the hope of toppling the government. That's what they do!

callalex• 3 years ago

Providing money and weapons to known terrorists is also an act of war, yet here we are.

xyzzy123• 3 years ago

OK yup, lol lets see if this is true, who is selling?

getmeinrn6• 3 years ago

This is one of those really horrible situations that you want to ban because the knowledge of its existence is too depressing to grasp. But if you ban it, you haven't solved the poverty issue, in fact you've made people even more desperate. It becomes even more dangerous, higher prices due to lower supply.

But the opposite isn't desirable either. Sure, you can make it more legal, but now these people are being systematically exploited for their organs and there would be very little reason for it to go away, meaning there would now be incentives to keep people brutally poor so that you can get their organs.

What if you made a social program that said "if you are desperate enough to sell your organs, come to us and we will give you resources so you don't need to (Conditions apply)." And in order to curb abuse, some small percentage of the applicants actually were required to donate an organ, so that the program wasn't exploited by people stealing resources from those very desperate people. If you take resources from this program, you risk actually selling an organ like you otherwise intended. Only truly desperate people would be brave enough to use the program. And if you think that compelled donation is also barbaric, even in a small percentage, it would actually be a lie, but one that some portion of the program's budget is dedicated to upholding.

paxys2• 3 years ago

TL;DR - what you really need to fix is poverty. Second (and third and fourth...) order effects will then automatically fix themselves.

getmeinrn6• 3 years ago

Yes - fix poverty, no - higher order effects will fix themselves.

Think about how many billions of COVID relief funds were stolen due to governments being terrible or corrupt at administration. There has to be some (perceived) risk to taking common resources. And that risk needs to be calibrated so that it does not phase truly desperate people, but discourages exploitative people to move on to easier targets. Imagine if by taking COVID relief funds, you signed a contract that could destroy your business and made everyone in your organization personally criminally liable, if the funds were taken fraudulently.

machina_ex_deus2• 3 years ago

Or they can just stop getting nuclear weapons. And spending all their money funding terror against Israel, in Yemen and in Syria. You know, the sane option that they could've done for years.

Truth is that Iran is a terrorist organization leaching of its people. They have plenty of options to fix their problem, but their priorities are holy wars and nuclear weapons. Sadly it will be incredibly difficult for the Iranian people to overthrow this regime, and many of the Iranians who could've fight back had been leaving the country for years. I can't blame them, but sadly, regimes like these usually spiral downward in this way.

getmeinrn6• 3 years ago

I don't think the allure of extremely desperate people selling their body parts will ever go away if an economy gets bad enough, and an economy being bad enough is not always dependent on some specific theoretically-easy-to-fix geopolitical situation.

infamouscow• 3 years ago

What a brain dead argument.

In literally (yes, literally) every instance sanctions result in increasing the human suffering of the population at the expense of an already authoritative government regime.

What you're arguing is for sanctions to increase human suffering to a point where the public has nothing left to lose and they topple the government. It ignores the quagmire that human suffering increases, but not to the point where people have nothing left to lose. It also ignores the high likelihood the new government is even more hostile rather than less.

You should genuinely be embarrassed for even suggesting this.

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

Yay the sanctions are working!

Soon there will be no urinating in Iran.

What's that? It was supposed to stop uranium ...

Good god what have we done?

weatherlite2• 3 years ago

Uranium, urinating, kidneys.. I see what you did there...

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Tells a lot on how lucky some have it with better government support systems

2-718-281-828• 3 years ago

wouldn't be surprised if kidney donor is going to be a job some day. a rich person pays a salary to a compatible potential donor and expects you to live healthy, workout, no alcohol etc. and ... if necessary part ways with one of your kidneys.

ryzvonusef2• 3 years ago

I am from Pakistan, were organ selling is technically illegal. And yet, it happens, poor bonded labourers end up with generational debt and sell their kidneys to try to recoup.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1737067/organ-racket

Iranians sell kidneys on Instagram to survive economic hardship

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