by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, that state’s prison board awarded a fat contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates, or HMA. The company was paid $3 million a year to run medical services for the state’s prison system, which had been blasted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court as an “evil place run by some evil men.”
HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 per pint of their blood. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Since Arkansas is one of the few states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, inmates were frequent donors at the so-called “blood clinic.” Hundreds of prisoners sold as much as two pints a week to HMA. The blood was then sold to pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and Baxter International; blood banks, such as the Red Cross; and so-called blood fractionizers, who transformed the blood into medicines for hemophiliacs.
IMAGE / Counterpunch
HMA’s contract with the Arkansas Department of Corrections and its entry into the blood market coincided with the rise of AIDS in the United States. Regardless, HMA did not screen the torrents of prison blood, even after the Food and Drug Administration issued special alerts about the higher incidents of AIDS and hepatitis in prison populations. When American drug companies and blood fractionizers stopped buying blood taken from prisoners in the early 1980s, HMA turned to the international blood market, selling to companies in Italy, France, Spain, and Japan. But the prime buyer of HMA’s tainted blood, largely drawn from Cummings Unit prisoners in Grady, Arkansas, was a notorious Canadian firm, called Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd. Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeling it as though it was from Swedish volunteers. The company also marketed blood taken from Haitian slums.
Cryosan passed the Arkansas prison blood on to the Canadian Red Cross and to European and Asian companies. The blood was recalled in 1983 after the FDA discovered contamination, but less than one-sixth of the blood was recovered. In Canada alone, more than 7,000 people have died from contaminated blood transfusions, many of them hemophiliacs. More than 4,000 of them died of AIDS. Another 40,000 people in Canada have contracted various forms of hepatitis.
Dr. Francis “Bud” Henderson started HMA in the 1970s. As the company began to expand, he brought in a Little Rock banker named Leonard Dunn to run the firm. Dunn was a political ally and friend of the Clintons. He was appointed by Clinton to sit on the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and served as finance chair of Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign. Later that same year, Dunn purchased the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan (later to achieve great notoriety in the Whitewater Scandal) from Clinton’s business partner, James McDougal. Dunn later served as chief of staff to Arkansas’ Lt. Governor, Winthrop Rockefeller.
Counterpunch for more