The Rise of the Red Market: How the medical community accidentally created an international organ-trafficking underground
…Because the idea of a marketplace in which body parts are bought and sold makes us squeamish, the growth in demand for human materials has been accompanied by an effort to build an ethically justifiable system for supplying them. Organs aren’t supposed to be bought and sold; rather, they are donated by altruistic individuals, and we pay for the services necessary to acquire them rather than for the organ itself.
There’s just one problem with this picture: It’s a fiction. Regulation of the supply of human tissue is haphazard at best; in most cases, people looking to acquire an organ have only the assurances of doctors and social workers to persuade them that everything is aboveboard and ethical. And the very provisions we’ve built into the system to bring it in line with the ethical norms of medicine and charity have made it easy for criminals to reap outlandish profits buying and selling human flesh.