Need money? What if you sell an organ, or two, on the black market?
Can a kidney help you get out of debt and pay the bills?
Need cash?
We’ve all heard jokes about selling a kidney to make due on the bills next month but what if you actually did it? How would that go and would it be profitable?
For starters, this is entirely hypothetical and predicated on a satirical view of various notions surrounding the topic so just roll with it for a bit. Let’s begin.
Pro tip: Use the Dark Web
For the sake of this article let’s just say that you need a lot of money and you need it relatively quickly. You do a quick Google search for ‘How to make money fast’ and then — Voila!
You have decided that you don’t really need two kidneys anyways. You’re not that selfish.
You start digging around and wind up knee deep on the dark web before you find a guy who knows a guy. He says it’ll be easy. In and out, bada bing bada boom. He’s probably done this a few times.
According to your Google-fu calculations you’ll make about $140k for your time and kidney, kind of.
Well, no. No you won’t lol.
Instead you dcided to go a little bit further down the search results page and saw that you might get $10k on the high side if you’re lucky, according to Sally Satel, but hey, you’re strapped for cash so full steam ahead!
(Spoiler alert, there’s an iceberg ahead also)
Remember that guy who knows a guy? Well that guy is a middleman a… er… broker of sorts. Yeah that’s it, a ‘broker’. And the guy he knows? Well, he’s a surgeon. The broker charges a fee and the surgeon gets a cut too. (See what I did there?)
Oh and don’t forget the hush money.
Post-op
Groggy and barely coherent, you wake up more out of your mind than you can imagine with one less kidney and some pending financial relief. Oh and your broker took off in the middle of the night and you just saw one of the nurses carrying not one but two boxes labeled ‘organ’.
Both have your name on them. Dafuq?
All in all it was a good experience. You got paid to travel, made $10k, went home and bought a boat instead of paying up the mortgage, then got an infection from a half-cocked surgery job and had to find a real doctor to fix you up.
So actually it was an okay experience because at least you are alive however, you’re down to about -$50K and five years in prison.
You’re also on a waiting list for a new liver now since half of yours was taken without you knowing. (maybe you can find one for sale online)
Ok so it was a horrible experience.
No refunds
To be fair, plenty of people get away with selling organs all the time. It’s illegal af though, which you would know had you clicked on that link a second ago. In other words, you absolutely should not be trying to find a way to sell an organ to make money. It’s a bad idea and should something go horribly wrong, there are no refunds.
Ironically enough, there have been calls to reform the current laws surrounding compensation for organ donors. Take a look at some of the arguments and models for legalization here and let me know what you think.
Is this a good idea or a downright terrible idea? Either way, the government will probably find a way to tax the hell out of it but I’m still interested in your opinion.
Maybe one day we will live in a country that allows people to sell their extra organs as a side hustle(?) Remember when Florida Man tried to auction off a kidney on eBay and the bid went up to $5.7M? Me neither. But it happened.
In the meantime you should definitely stick to making money legally. It’ll be a much more pleasant experience…in Nevada…
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