31. Good Talk #6: Kathleen McLaughlin
Happy February, friends. Today I’m very excited to introduce you to Kathleen McLaughlin, a brilliant Montana-based journalist who I have had the pleasure of getting to know over the past year. She’s the subject of the latest “Good Talk” interview, and in our conversation below, we discuss her deeply-reported, brilliant new book, Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry. (Read previous interviews in the “Good Talk” series here.)
Really quickly before we get into it, I wanted to let you know about a couple of in-person events I have scheduled around Oregon.
The first is an event with Kathleen herself, to celebrate the release of Blood Money. We’ll be “in conversation,” as they say, at Powell’s City of Books on Tuesday, Feb. 28 at 7 pm. If you enjoy what you read here, please come down and say hi! There’s so much more to say about her project.
Secondly: I’m so thrilled to be a part of Hillsboro Reads 2023. I’ll be doing a reading and signing of When the Moon Turns to Blood at the Hillsboro Brookwood Library — a beautiful space where I have written MANY a long-form article — on Tuesday, March 7 at 6:30 pm.
Please keep an eye to my events page, where I will be posting some more readings and workshops soon.
As always, please consider a paid subscription to this newsletter. Why, Leah, why do you insist on asking me this again?! Very, very bluntly: a paid subscription allows me to keep doing the job of a freelance journalist in the western United States. My projects take a long time, and are very often under-funded. In most cases, I’m barely getting paid to write them. When you subscribe, not only does it directly contribute to creating journalism, but it keeps me out reporting on stories that other people cannot.
In this interview with Kathleen, we talk about her career working as a reporter in Montana and China, and why writing about her own personal health crisis in Blood Money was both difficult and necessary to fully explain the plasma industry. And, of course, we talk about Yellowstone. (Kathleen is a freelancer like me, and she tells me she’s relaunching her Substack soon — subscribe here.)
LEAH SOTTILE:
You have been a reporter in Montana and China and I'm wondering if you can tell me how reporting in those places is similar
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN:
My reporting is similar because I'm always trying to look for stories that other people aren't doing. That's always been my guiding principle: to find stories that illustrate things that people aren't necessarily talking about. I find it really boring to do the same stories as everyone else.
When I moved to China, I was immediately drawn to stories about labor and workers' rights, labor law, things like that. And I'm sure that comes directly from my background in Montana, just having grown up in a labor town. It was a very interesting time to be there.
I was in China during the period when it really became the place that makes everything. And so all of these factories were popping up. There were labor unions that were super active trying to get better protections for workers, so there was that constant kind of tension going on. There were government crackdowns on the unions. There were factory workers getting sick and injured on the job. I mean, it was very much kind of the same stories that we saw in the US generations before. And I had just growing up here, I had read so much about that and I was super interested in it.
As far as similarities, I will say press freedom in the US has definitely declined. And that's in large part due to Donald Trump and people like him who diminish the press and reporters. It is difficult to get people to talk now because they don't trust reporters the way that they used to. We used to have this automatic trust.
I saw that decline in China while I was there as well. We're nowhere near on the same planet in terms of repression of critical voices and silencing of the press. One of my biggest concerns when I was reporting in China was always how to do a story without getting my sources in trouble. Because I was an American, the odds of them doing anything to me were pretty slim. But the way that they would enact a form of censorship is to apply the pressure to your sources, to the Chinese citizens who you work with, to people that you know. And we just don't have that here yet.
The fact that you say ‘yet’ is a little scary.
Well, I did the classic American thing: I lived overseas for 15 years and I was there long enough to idealize my home country. I had been a reporter here before I went to China and things were different then. So I had this idea that, ‘oh, well, America has this great free press and we really value that and we're not gonna let that go. And people trust media.’ And then I came home part-time in 2016 and I was like, ‘holy shit. We are going down a very dark path.’ I don't think people know how bad it can get.
One thing that I found so sobering about reading your book was that it opened my eyes to a whole world — in my own country, but also beyond it, that I just didn't even know was there. Why didn’t I know about the AIDS epidemic in China? You have a unique perspective that I think a lot of people don't have because they have these American blinders on to the issues of the rest of the world.
It's kind of interesting, right? I was super obsessed with what had happened in China in creating that AIDS crisis because of my own personal issue. I take this drug that's made from human blood plasma. Like, I depend on it. And so, ever since I started taking it, which would be almost 20 years ago now, I have wondered where the hell does this come from? And who?
So I'm reporting on China and I kind of stumbled into this thing of, ‘oh my God, look what happened with this blood disaster.’ … And then I started wondering, ‘wait a minute, where does my drug actually come from?’ Because I had American drugs that were sold in the US because the drugs in China were unsafe. So then you start to think, 'wait a minute, we might have the same thing.’ And then I came back to the US and found out that we had done exactly the same thing as China, and in some way we had made the same mistakes. There was an AIDS crisis in our blood system. There was hepatitis crisis in our blood system. A lot of people died during the AIDS epidemic from it.
I think that if I didn't have this condition that requires me to depend on other people's blood, I wouldn't have launched into this. I know that I wouldn't have. I don't know that I would've thought that much about where this product comes from. For most people who don't have financial hardship, we don't think about this. And I think that it's been deliberately hidden. The for-profit plasma companies locate their facilities in strip malls and kind of obscure places that most people don't go to.
In most places they're kind of tucked out of the way. I think that's deliberate. I think it's the same way that most people don't think that deeply about pawn shops. They don't think that deeply about other industries that do this kind of exploitation. I always think of a dollar store the same way. Most people just don't think about that too much. It’s a class issue.
Most people don't know how common it is, I think that even people who sell plasma don't really know that they are very far from being alone and that it's just gotten super common now.
Yeah, I had no clue how common it was.
Well, I really didn't either. I knew that it had to be a big number of people, and I still don't know the exact number. I knew that it had to be a big number just because there is this massive volume extracted from people in the US every year. It's in the millions. You don't come up with that amount of plasma without having millions of people donate it. I didn't know that it had become really part of our economic system. You know, like, this is what people have now to supplement incomes, which is insane. Like, how did we become that?
I think that's part of Blood Money’s power, is that it brings together all these threads in a way that make you like, ask deep existential questions about American identity. I think blood plasma donation centers fade into the landscape of the western United States. I think about one very prominently in Spokane that I drove and walked past every single day. I never thought twice about it. So tell me what we're ignoring when we're pawn-shopping and dollar-storing away the plasma industry.
We're ignoring that there's a significant portion of our citizenry who can't afford the basic necessities of life in some cases, or can't afford to have a nice life in other cases. There are people that sell plasma to save up for vacations; it's not always desperate. But what we're missing is how badly we've hollowed out the middle class in America and how it really almost doesn't exist anymore. And instead we have people who are just scraping, scraping, scraping and struggling and doing whatever they can to try and have a decent life.
This is probably my own personal bias, but I do think that because couple of things have happened. Local media has been so hollowed out. Local media used to be really kind of the working class center of journalism. You had people who really came from towns and states, who weren't necessarily wealthy, working in newspapers. That’s kind of gone. You only have a few journalists in local places now. National media, in my opinion, is populated by one particular socioeconomic class who doesn't have a lot of experience with poverty or the working poor or being in the working class. So you see what you see. You know what you know, right? You see your own lived experience. It's the flaw we all have. As journalists, you're looking at the world through a lens of your own experience. You'll see kind of spotty stories here and there in national newspapers about teachers having to sell their blood during a strike or so-and-so had to sell their blood plasma because inflation was really bad. But there isn't a lot of thought given to, ‘okay, wages are so low, inflation is so high, housing is off the charts. What the hell are people doing to survive?’ Like, what is filling the gap for people?
Another interesting piece of this too is that plasma selling is so common with younger people. I'm talking in college. That seems to be the age when people really, really do it. And again, you look at national media, and where most people who work for national media or prestige media, where they went to college. They’re not going to big public universities where people are selling their plasma to buy beer.
That's a great point.
And that's fine. It's just a different experience. But when the people who have the megaphone all have a very similar life experience and they're not familiar with this world, then they don't see it as a systemic thing because they don't understand how big it is and how widespread it is. The stories that I see about it are painted as a fragmented thing. And it really isn’t. After doing all this reporting. I really feel like it's just woven into the fabric.
There's a line in your book you’re reminding me of: “The world of blood is built on the bodies of the poor, giving it to the better-off and making a few select people wealthy in the process. The blood game is rigged and always has been.” It sort of struck me that maybe only someone from Butte, Montana could write that line.
It's not very subtle, is that what you're saying? [laughs]
No, I mean someone maybe who grew up very much understanding what wealthy people will do to the bodies and the lives of the working class.
It definitely could be. It is ingrained in me that I don't really think about it that much. It always just surprises me that most people don't see the world that way. It's always surprised me the way people worship wealth. And it probably is from having grown up in a place where I saw what extreme wealth and wealth extraction did to ordinary people. So it could be, it definitely could be. I mean, I am a product of this place, there's no question about it. I think living in China for so long probably also shaped me because I saw how powerless the most powerless people in China — and the people I probably spent the most time with reporting — were people who didn't have money. And it was just so clear that that was the dividing line and the only dividing line. And I'm not sure where that different in that way.
I lived through the eighties here [in Butte], which is when the majority of mining shut down. The mining that came back did not include labor unions and it became very clear that this is a different place. It was started as a company town, but it was very clear that the company held all the power and people were kind of at the mercy of the whims of the Company. The Company decided overnight to shut down the smelter in Anaconda, and Anaconda kinda died for a while. The Company decided overnight to shut down the mines in Butte, but oops! They didn't shut off the pumps in the Berkeley Pit. So it's filled with toxic water and now we live with that. These are the decisions of very wealthy people who have no risk and no stake in the place. Again, a lot of Americans who have media platforms or a voice or whatever, don't have this lived experience. And so it's not so clear to them. But it just isn't something that I really thought about not being true. It was always so obvious. I mean, I think we read The War of the Copper Kings when I was probably like 10. It was just something that we lived with.
I mean, you've been here: one of the most interesting things to me is when you go to the old mine sites, the head frames, and there's a sign at each head frame and it tells you the name of the mine and some little famous fact about it. And then in big, bold letters: the death toll of that place. Here's how many men died working in this place. That's a very deliberate choice to make for a place. Like, yes, we want you to come here and be a tourist and understand the history, but this is how many people died here. I don't think Butte has ever been subtle about reminding people what happened here. Like, yes, look at this quaint little town, But also, people died. This is not cute.
A minute ago you talked about that the decisions of very wealthy people who have no risk or stake in the place — how that was very much in your life experience growing up. Do you worry about that now again with the Governor Gianfortes of the world, the Ryan Zinkes of the world?
Oh hell yes. The men who are running this state right now are not at all touched in any way that the crises that we are experiencing. It does not affect their lives in any negative way. We have a massive housing crisis right now. We have record numbers of people who are unhoused. We have young people who are leaving the state because they can't afford to live here. They can never afford to buy a home here. And the governor is uber-wealthy. It doesn't affect him in any negative way. Yeah. And I don't think he gives a shit. I really don't. The other people who have been elected to run this state are also well off. None of them are affected by the real issues that actual people who work here are experiencing.
What they have done really, really, really well is play on the resentment vote. And there is a lot of resentment here, but people are resenting the wrong thing. Like, people have been led down a path of resenting things that don't affect their lives. And again, I think that's partly due to the death of local news. People used to be able to read a local newspaper every morning and understand what was going on in their community and get upset about it, or get involved, or at least be entertained. And local newspapers in Montana right now are in such a state that Fox News or whatever national news, cable network you're watching is more interesting. And so you get caught up in this national bullshit, which has very little to do with us. And I think the Republicans who are in charge have been very good at coalescing around that.
What do you think the resentment vote is based on? Or directed towards?
I'm not really sure. It just feels like that kind of garden white man resentment. It shocked me as much as anyone when Montana flipped to Deep Red kind of overnight. Again, I kind of live in a bubble because Butte has never flipped. We still vote Democrat in this town. And so I'm not around a lot of people like that. In that recent Abe Streep story, he really made the point that a lot of the people who have moved here are bringing toxic politics with them. If you look at the change in demo in demographics in Kalispell and the Bitterroot, especially, and the massive population increase in those two places, and the massive increase in the amount of power they have in state politics, I think that is a big part of it. So, whereas Butte used to be a major force in Montana politics, it's really not anymore.
You know, Yellowstone has done some real damage to this state. People see Montana as this place that they can reinvent themselves. I know people who have moved here in recent years have watched Yellowstone and think it's great. I've seen it once or twice and it is ridiculous. There's always been this notion about the West: it's this place where you come to reinvent yourself as a rugged individualist or a cowboy, or whatever the hell it is you wanna be that has no grounding in reality and no grounding in history or respect for the place.
I want to go back to your book: I like that you frame it as like this like sort of vampiric American tradition that we've now established. But also, you spell out the reality that people are selling literal body parts. When people are doing that at the volume that they are, what do you think that that tells us about the character of our country right now?
We're broken. We're absolutely broken. And we don't give a shit about people who aren't wealthy. We've really decided as a society to just let people fend for themselves without care or protection. I don't fault everyone for this, but our elected officials and our regulatory structures have really just failed the people in our society who have the least amount of power. And it's obscene.
There was a girl I met in Rexburg and, God, I can't stop thinking about her. She was probably 18 or 19, and she came out of the plasma center after selling plasma, just shivering. She was so cold because of the process of injecting different fluids and sitting in the place — she just looked so vulnerable and she didn't have a problem with doing it. I just wanted someone to take care of her. It was so sad to see this 19 year old young woman and her option for earning money was selling a piece of herself.
The whole thing, for me, it's been very uncomfortable because I depend on other people's plasma, but when I see that it is collected from people who don't feel like they have other options, I find it very upsetting.
The book, in so many ways, is an exercise in holding two very disparate things in your mind. You see the very clear benefit of plasma donation: that you yourself are able to live your life because of this industry. And yet there's that shivering woman on the other end.
We've talked in the past a bit about personal writing and how uncomfortable that is for you, but do you think that this exercise made you have any revelations about selling a bit of yourself — your story — for the greater good?
It kind of felt like a fair exchange. I don't think that I could have written this book without writing about myself. The way that I would do this reporting is I would literally go stand outside the plasma centers and just catch people as they came out. And they had this bandage around their arm right here, so you can tell who's just donated plasma. And the first or second thing that I would always say to people is, ‘I actually get plasma.’
I felt like I had to because I'm accosting these people as they come out of the plasma center and asking them to tell me why they do it. And a hundred percent of the time the answer [of why they were donating] was money. Why do they need money? I’m asking them to tell me these personal stories, and most people were totally fine with telling me, but it felt only fair to tell them why I wanted to know.
I do believe there is altruism in this, too. I think that there are very few opportunities for people who aren't wealthy to give back to our society with the way that we have things structured. Donating money or giving money are seen as the most important things. This is a way for people who don't have extra money to give back.
I got a lot of positive responses from people when I would tell them, ‘I actually need this.’ And they would say, ‘oh wow. I didn't think I'd ever meet someone who used it.’ So that's cool. I don't think I could have written the book without including my own story.
I was just talking to a friend this morning about the idea of kind of vulnerability and deliberate vulnerability. There's this kind of mantra as a writer that you're supposed to be vulnerable. But I oftentimes think it's only the people who aren't vulnerable, who aren't truly vulnerable, who can afford to be vulnerable. I hid this illness from most people for a very long time because we're an ableist society. There’s employment discrimination, societal discrimination, everything else if you acknowledge there's something wrong with your body. So coming out and saying, 'oh, hey, my body's all fucked up.’ I have exposed an actual vulnerability that could lead to potential consequences, if that makes sense.
I mean, let's be honest: if I didn't have this personal component to it, I wouldn't have spent this much time thinking about plasma donation. And I wouldn't have spent this much time reporting on it. Had I ever done any reporting about the plasma industry, I probably would've been like most journalists and done a one-off story: ‘oh look at this. It's weird. People are selling their blood.’ I don't think I would have been compelled to go really deep on it and say, ‘what the hell is this?’
If you talk to people who do it, they're doing it for money. So how did we make this decision that that is okay? I keep thinking about this woman, too, that I interviewed in Texas who was selling plasma for a number of months to pay off court fines. She said this twice in our interviews, that she would sell a kidney if she could. Where do we draw these lines?
I mean, when I got to her story in the book, that’s when I just started screaming. It shows truly the horrors that we will tolerate as a society.
We have decided as a society that some people are more valuable than others, that some lives are more valuable than others, that some people's bodies matter more than other people's bodies. These are things that I kind of always knew, but now I know they're true.