“Stemming from bone cancer-afflicted limb amputation, my law enforcement career halted. Albeit unplanned and ill-prepared, a whole new world opened up for me. Amusingly, I learned that my new leg had its own license plate.”
The “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movie was produced in 1955 and its redux starring Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy and Jeff Goldblum was in 1978. Recently, the script was kind of modified, was printed on a federal warrant, and was portrayed by Jeff Sessions’ FBI men and women in black. And it was real.
On November 01, 2017 FBI agents armed with a warrant raided, searched and seized records at MedCure, Inc. in Portland, Oregon. MedCure, Inc. is a “whole body donation” company in the business of obtaining human cadavers or body parts and marketing to health administrations needing specimens to study, train surgical procedures, and advance medical science.
Although the purpose of FBI scrutiny is unknown, instead of the customary request for records via subpoena, federal agents evidently accumulated enough probable cause to obtain a warrant from a federal judge. FBI agents stormed the body broker’s headquarters, confiscating and carting-off boxes of written material.
FBI spokesperson Beth Anne Steele offered no comment as to the feds’ investigative intent other than to say the warrant is “under seal” while agents continue sleuthing.
According to The Oregonian, “MedCure was in expansion mode for the past several years” adding that “During the Great Recession, it saw a dramatic growth in body donations.” Free enterprise is not an issue, but perhaps predatory practices powered by a thirst for increased profits are the undercurrents the FBI is navigating.
“From 2011 through 2015, documents obtained under public-record laws show, the company received more than 11,000 donated bodies and distributed more than 51,000 body parts to medical industry customers nationally. In a current brochure, the company says that 80,000 additional people have pledged to donate their bodies to MedCure when they die,” Newsmax reported.
According to Reuters, MedCure essentially focuses on indigent persons who can ill-afford traditional funeral burials or cremations for themselves or deceased loved ones. To this economy-stifled demographic, MedCure reportedly sells the notion of “whole body donation,” thus profiting from selling either entire cadavers or body parts to research labs across the nation.
On its site, MedCure advertises “No cost cremation” which, logically, is the end result after a cadaver is sold and research-exhausted. Is that a hook in which the federal government has an investigative interest of some kind? I can see where indigency may find that offer handsome, but not if there is a boatload of currency being made by exploiting such a desperate demographic.
Industry Standards?
Organic tissue cultivation and marketing is a seemingly loosely-regulated but lucrative industry with mild oversight. These are human body parts we are talking about, not diesel engine components or vacuum cleaner attachments or cafeteria lunch-trays. I find it befuddling to think that regulatory authorities are not prevalently involved in stringently enforcing governmental guidelines for body brokers, seemingly allowing impropriety to flourish while enormous profits flow.
Since MedCure markets whole cadavers and/or body parts to research centers where health field professionals study medicine and hone surgical procedures, it seems prudent to track every aspect of this unique industry’s commerce, morality, and economic ethics predicating its ethos.
Reuters conducted a multi-phase analysis pertaining to the body parts industry, specifically focused on MedCure. It documented how “people who donate their bodies to science may be unwittingly contributing to commerce. Few states regulate the body donation industry, and those that do so have different rules, enforced with varying degrees of thoroughness. Body parts can be bought with ease in the United States.” In our contemporary society with all its present upheaval and evolution, has this industry’s practices fallen through the cracks?
Each prosthesis is branded with a serial number which correlates to the prescription written by a medical doctor for the purposes of one sole individual (patient) to possess a particular prosthetic leg or arm (or sometimes both).
In a rather gross yet starkly real portrayal of the seemingly casual nature of cadaver and body part marketing, “a Reuters reporter bought two heads and a spine from a Tennessee broker with just a few emails.” Where is the accountability? The only paper trail consists of emails and a form of payment, without an identifiable face and handshake? No bona fide licenses required from both the seller and the purchaser?
According to its research, Reuters distilled, “MedCure is accredited by the American Association of Tissue Banks, a national organization that primarily works with transplant tissue banks. The broker is also licensed by the state health departments in Oregon and New York, among the few states that conduct inspections.”
Personal/Professional Experience
Stemming from bone cancer-afflicted limb amputation, my law enforcement career halted. Albeit unplanned and ill-prepared, a whole new world opened up for me. Amusingly, I learned that my new leg had its own license plate.
Like an automobile’s VIN (vehicle identification number) or a citizen’s social security number, prostheses have unique identifiers too…and are governed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) whose law enforcement division investigates violations of law pertaining to health-based factors.
Each prosthesis is branded with a serial number which correlates to the prescription written by a medical doctor for the purposes of one sole individual (patient) to possess a particular prosthetic leg or arm (or sometimes both). My first candid thought was As a cop, I never knew that…and any police officer investigating an unidentified dead body can advance the investigation by knowing the prosthetic’s serial number chronicles who the decedent is. The specific identifier avails a host of data and personal details.
Each and every law enforcement officer I shared that with was enlightened, mouth agape, invisible thought-cloud overhead. Admittedly, it is uncommon and extraneous, so I am not surprised the police academy didn’t expose that factor in “Homicide Investigations” courses. Granted, the probability of investigating a dead body which has a prosthetic limb is quite slim, but that one time when the subject has no ID yet dons a prosthetic device…can result in a Eureka! moment for street cops on-scene and the lead detective working the case, providing they are keen to this uncommon knowledge.
Police Procedural
Like anything non-traditional in police procedural manifestos, unorthodox investigative encounters engender people whose fortes and specialties are non-mainstream. In law enforcement, forensics is a wide umbrella under which esoteric topics are addressed.
Coinciding with the writing of this article is an FBI press release announcing the agency’s recruitment of special agents skilled in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).
The FBI and larger cop shops may have archaeologists pay-rolled to study “bones without a home” (as was once referenced by a homicide detective I know). Investigative arms known as pathologists or medical examiners or coroners dissect and unearth answers from bodies (or parts) with reasonable certainty. The FBI employs its National Dental Image/Information Repository housing millions of dental records so that, minus verifiable ID on a deceased individual, dental comparisons can be made so as to potentially put a name to the decedent.
So if MedCure is deemed in violation of cadaver or body part improprieties, these specialists are instrumental in scientifically unearthing flesh-centric clues. The Department of Health (DoH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are agencies whose criminal investigations divisions enforce regulatory violations. But again, Reuters found eyes-on and ears-open diligence to be grossly lax in the body-brokering industry.
Coinciding with the writing of this article is an FBI press release announcing the agency’s recruitment of special agents skilled in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). STEM-educated law enforcement officials speaks to the heart of how the FBI is seeking to be more well-rounded and empirically fashioned to conduct investigations from A-Z. When I explored joining the FBI years ago, their recruitment harped on candidates possessing either accounting or law degrees.
My feeling is that the FBI is distilling some financial crimes (or what appears to be specious accounting) and/or some predatory practices whereby citizens are being pressured to donate in the interest of increased revenue stakes in MedCure coffers. The FBI conceded it removed only boxes of documents and no human tissues whatsoever. Neither FDA investigators nor any other law enforcement entity supplemented the FBI.
After all, MedCure’s own website espouses over 80,000 donated bodies in its queue of research specimens. No idea what their price structure contains, but I can imagine nothing as highly organic as human form and substance is inexpensive.
Surely, advancements in modern medical science is necessary…provided it is not treated as a money-making machine.
What do you think the FBI is after?
