On 20 July 1999, the Chinese Communist Party leadership initiated a nationwide crackdown and multifaceted propaganda campaign directed against the practice. It blocked Internet access to websites that mention Falun Gong, and in October 1999 it declared Falun Gong a "heretical organization" that threatened social stability. Falun Gong practitioners in China are reportedly subject to a wide range of human rights abuses: hundreds of thousands are estimated to have been imprisoned extrajudicially,[13] and practitioners in detention are subject to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities.[14] As of 2009, human rights groups estimated that at least 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners had died within China as a result of abuse in custody.[15] One writer estimates that tens of thousands may have been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry.[16]