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Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she\\u2019d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America\\u2019s most vulnerable.\\xa0

Blood Money shares McLaughlin\\u2019s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit \\u2014 a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. McLaughlin investigates the thin evidence that pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. In the process, she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America\\u2019s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay.

McLaughlin\\u2019s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others.\\xa0Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin\\u2019s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American, with revealing portrait of what happens when big business is allowed to feed, unchecked, on those least empowered to fight back.

Kathleen McLaughlin\\xa0is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to\\xa0The\\xa0Washington Post\\xa0and\\xa0The Guardian, McLaughlin\\u2019s reporting has also appeared in\\xa0The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist,\\xa0NPR,\\xa0and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China.\\xa0Blood Money\\xa0is her first book.

Shaun Scott\\xa0is a Seattle-based writer and historian. A former Pramila Jayapal staffer and Bernie Sanders 2020 Washington State Field Director, he is currently the Policy Lead at the Statewide Poverty Action Network. His essays about popular culture and late capitalism have appeared in\\xa0Sports Illustrated, The Guardian, and\\xa0Jacobin Magazine. He is the author of the paperback\\xa0Millennials and the Moments that Made Us: A Cultural History of the US from 1982-Present, and the forthcoming hardcover from UW Press\\xa0Heartbreak City: Sports and the Progressive Movement in Urban America.