When Montana-based journalist Kathleen McLaughlin set out to report on the United States’ blood plasma industry, she had a distinctly personal reason for doing so: McLaughlin has a rare chronic illness that requires her to receive infusions of a treatment made in part from other people’s plasma. McLaughlin, who has spent much of her career reporting from China, wanted to learn more about an industry that has played such a central role in her life.

Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry, the book McLaughlin published earlier this year, is a harrowing dive into the underbelly of a multibillion-dollar industry that has largely been hidden from public view — a tour of places and people who have been forced to sell parts of their bodies to survive in a country that has all but abandoned them.

Jacobin caught up with McLaughlin to learn more about the blood plasma industry and the grinding economic conditions that have fueled its rise.