I have no idea what that poem means, only that Carrol wrote it for Alice “Through the Looking Glass”. My grandmother was a librarian and I would sit at the library after school waiting for her. She gave me the book from a library sale and I couldn’t understand the poem, became frustrated, and told her I didn’t like the book because of it. She very calmly told me I was reading it with my head and not my ears, so try reading it out loud so I could hear it. It is now one of my favorite poems. Sometimes when I don’t understand things now I still remember what she said, so I try it a different way. And sometimes it works.

Prostitution is the oldest trade for women in the world, but that isn’t what I am talking about here. I am talking about selling our organs for cash on the black market. Out of the nearly 70,000 kidney transplants that will happen world wide in the next 12 months, 20 percent of them will be from the black market. People desperate for cash can sell their kidneys not only in the alleys of third world nations, but here in America. 

Organ trafficking mostly consists of kidneys, but also of half-livers, eyes, skin and blood, and is flourishing. Most of that trade can be explained by the simple laws of supply and demand. Increasing life spans, better diagnosis of kidney failure and improved surgeries that can be safely performed on even the riskiest of patients have spurred unprecedented demand for human organs. In America, the number of people in need of a transplant has nearly tripled during the past decade, topping 100,000 for the first time last October. But despite numerous media campaigns urging more people to mark the backs of their driver’s licenses, the number of traditional (deceased) organ donors has barely budged, hovering between 5,000 and 8,000 per year for the last 15 years.

It has been shown that the organ from a live patient is going to keep you alive twice as long as one from a cadaver and you no longer need a family member to offer the donation thanks to new, powerful anti-rejection medication. 

There is a debate on whether or not we should create a legal market for organ selling. Here is an argument I found for organ selling:

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who received a kidney from a friend in 2006, says:“Despite decades and decades of public education about the virtues of organ donation, the waiting list just gets longer, and the time to transplantation just gets longer. … It’s past time to face the fact that altruism is just not enough. Many people need more of an incentive to give. And that’s why we need to be able to compensate people who are willing to give a kidney to a stranger, to save a life. … We are not talking about a classic commercial free-for-all, or a free market, or an eBay system. We’re talking about a third-party payer. For example, today you could decide to give a kidney. You’d be called a Good Samaritan donor. … The only difference in a model that I’m thinking about is where you go and give your organ, and your retirement account is wired $40,000, end of story.”

Here is one I found against organ selling:

David Rothman, professor of social medicine at Columbia University and director of the Center on Medicine as a Profession, says: ”What this is really about is the sale of organs from living donors. … There are very, very good reasons — many drawn from behavioral economics, some drawn from past experience — that suggest that, in fact, to create a market might diminish the supply, not increase it. In the first instance, if I can buy it why should I give it?… In England, where the sale of blood was not allowed, rates of donation were considerably higher than the U.S., where the sale of blood was allowed.” 

In black market overseas organ trafficking, people do not have the option of backing out after they have agreed to sell an organ. Dorin Razlog, a shepherd with an eighth-grade education who lives in Ghincauti, says recruiters for a trafficking ring told him cash for a kidney would lift him out of poverty. After doctors in Istanbul cut out the organ in August 2002, they paid him $7,000 — $3,000 less than they’d offered. Of that, $2,500 was in counterfeit bills, he said. 

“They told me they would send people to destroy my house and kill my family if I went to the police,” Razlog, 30, says. Today, the money is long gone, and he sleeps on a musty mattress inside the rusting hulk of an abandoned Russian van next to a pigsty. At the end of some days, Razlog says, he’s writhing from pain in his remaining kidney.

“The only way out is death,” he says.

I am an organ donor on my driver’s license. Many people I know will not mark a yes for fear of not receiving life saving care in the hospital if they mark yes. They fear insurance companies, surgeons, and hospital administrations. Robin Cook does not help that fear with his medical thrillers about organ donation. I dated a transplant surgeon once with a very dark sense of humor. His solution was to make every motorcycle rider a mandatory donor, as that is where a bulk of his transplants came from. 

This is a topic I am completely unsure of where I stand. Completely and totally undecided, which is rare. I usually sway one way or the other, but this time I am more interested in hearing what other people think. On one hand, it’s a needed commodity and legalizing will make it safer and take it away from the criminals. On the other, it’s exploiting poor people to sell their health for a financial gain that may not help them long term. I don’t know. Do you think the market for selling organs should be legal?

Coming from a very conservative background, I know the importance of living within my means. My father built a company from nothing, makes sure he owes nothing, and will never consider driving anything that he doesn’t pay for outright. I treasure the lessons he taught me and find that I am not as vulnerable to the “Keeping up with the Jones” mentality as other people I have met. 

However. There is always a however, isn’t there? However, a kid that graduates college at 22 with an average of 60 to 80 K in student loan debts and little, if any, significant work experience will not likely be able to find adequate employment to pay the 700 a month or so that is associated with their education while doing everything else they are supposed to do – put money away in savings, drive a dependable car, start a retirement plan, live independently. More likely, they will need to buy a car (ding $300 to 400 a month), not put money into savings so they can eat and drive, maybe live with roommates, and try to pay down their loans on their estimated 25 to 30K. Then they will get hit with car repairs, transition into living on their own, need professional dress, and start relying on credit cards. 

Even someone who successfully navigated through their twenties and reached their thirties with their credit intact and made good decisions may start encountering other problems, such as dental and medical debt. An average root canal and crown is $3,000. Insurance covers 50 percent, leaving $1,500 for the patient. Without that money in savings or a MSA, that cost will be financed. Anyone with a toothache understands there is no waiting if there is anyway possible. That is just for a toothache, what about when serious medical issues happen? Chronic disease of a person or their child, caring for aging parents, a terrible accident with little insurance coverage – any one of these is likely to happen to people. Even careful people cannot be prepared for the financial devastation that comes with these types of events, and often people find themselves in bankruptcy court before they reach 50. 

If our next generation is going to be successful, changes need to happen. Education is hardly optional (some cases excluded) to live a financially secure life and medical and dental care aren’t optional to live a quality life at all. I don’t have the answers of what needs to change, I only know that something has to give. Our bankrupt nation full of bankrupt citizens is not what we were taught America stands for. 

I am a believer in financial education for all people, particularly our young people. I volunteered for Junior Achievement and I know there are many organizations that focus on financial education and literacy before kids leave high school. I wish that were enough. We can teach our kids to resist the urge to use credit cards for spring break, to not buy a sports car right out of college, and to save their pennies. But that is only handling what they can control, not what they can’t.  Preparation helps, but can’t always save the farm.

Without some sort of health reform ensuring that our citizens are covered for medical and dental and some sort of education reform, changing the way universities and/or trade schools charge, I fear for our young people. Being young is hard enough without the additional burden of a mountain of debt that they will be lucky to climb out of. 

Have a great weekend.

I have much to say about this topic, and I am sure I will spew my opinions over the next few weeks because it is close to my heart right now. When I worked with cities and towns one of our primary goal was economic development and attracting valuable jobs to rural areas. Though there are too many complexities to get into here, one of the biggest deterrents was the high number of meth users in a small pool of potential employees. It is difficult to persuade a company to invest in a town that has an unstable pool of employees. 

The problem in rural areas is  huge, as it is easier to cook meth without detection. That lowers the cost of the drug because it removes the transportation and some of the organized crime. It also lowers the quality (is that possible?) because a lack of proper chemicals and people making substitutions.We have all heard about the bath salts incident that caused the zombie attack in FL. 

People use meth for many reasons. One of the big draws is weight loss. It  is an amphetamine, causes you to stay up, have no appetite and more energy than you can have naturally. It also makes you feel like a star, confident, sexy, euphoric. After prolonged use it is reported that a user is unable to produce dopamine and feel good chemcals without the drug. Basically, it destroys your pleasure center of the brain while it ravages your body. More information can be found at this site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/body/

We have all seen the commercials about what happens to people who use meth. It is a persuasive ad, I can’t imagine why anyone would try after seeing it. 

Yet people still do. I spent time with a former meth user recently. I felt like a moron. I have studied the impacts of meth, seen what has happened to meth houses, participated in task force groups to aid children of meth users, but I didn’t truly understand what it does. I am sure I still don’t. She was an obese girl when I met her, she was 16. She began using meth to lose weight, fit in, have a crowd. She isn’t obese anymore, but that isn’t really the point. She is less than 30 and looked older than my mother. She shook, she still had skin sores and scars from old sores, she didn’t have many teeth left and she looked haggard. Worse though, she seemed empty and sad. I hope the help she is utilizing can bring the light back to her eyes.

Meth is expensive, for all of us. “The economic cost of methamphetamine use in the United States reached $23.4 billion in 2005, including the burden of addiction, premature death, drug treatment and many other aspects of the drug, according to a new RAND Corporation study.” http://www.rand.org/news/press/2009/02/04/meth.html

“In 2005 it was reported that 58 percent of law enforcement officials in 500 counties surveyed by the National Association of Counties cite methamphetamine as their biggest drug problem. Half in the sample said that up to 20 percent of their inmates were incarcerated because of meth-related crimes, and some segments representing small counties and areas in the upper Midwest reported as many as 75 to 100 percent of their incarcerations as meth-related.

While that survey drew on a disproportionate number of counties in the West where meth is most widely available, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) in February 2005, published results from a larger, random sample of 3,400 drug enforcement agencies nationwide. In the NDIC survey, for the first time since they have been taking such surveys, a plurality (40 percent) considered meth their leading drug threat. Cocaine came in second at 36 percent, and marijuana at 12 percent.” 

I want to go on and on, about the personal impact meth use makes, the local, the state and nation wide impact it makes economically and socially. I want to explain the history of meth and preach that if it were regulated and controlled it wouldn’t be so dangerous. I want to talk about the devastation I have seen a family go through with a loved one on meth. But most of my posts are preachy, in one sense or another, so I am going to decline. Instead I am just going to say my prayers for the family I know that is going through this and all of the victims of the users and the users themselves. I know well enough to know that it could have been me if I had tried it, even once.