Reefer Ring

La cucaracha, la cucaracha

Ya no quiere cdminar

Porque no tiene, porque le falta

Marijuana que fumar.*

So sang Pancho Villa's ragged army in one of the most famous of all Latin American soldier songs. U.S. soldiers, better heeled than the cockroach, gave ear, took up the marijuana habit. Later they smoked the reefers in Panama, and when World War II took them to bases in Ecuador, the hop habit they brought was the answer to a medicine man's prayers.

The medicine man was Orley Burham, a mysterious Ecuadorian-born Scot who years ago had shacked up with a half-breed cook named Rosa Elvira Felix, and opened for business as curandero (quack) to the Indian villagers of Puellaro. Before long Rosa shared the secret of the strange seed which he got the Indians to plant among the corn. His brothers, Juan and Nelson, peddled the dried plant as cigarets in Guayaquil or sent it on to Panama.

"Business was bad," Juan Burham told Guayaquil police, "until the North American soldiers came to Salinas." After that, sales doubled. At one time the integrated farm-to-market Burham system had produced around 900 smokes a day, most of them inhaled by U.S. troops in Ecuador. Then, about the time the gringo customers were ordered home, Orley Burham died. Rosa, whom he had married two years before his death, tried to carry on.

This was too much for Orley's son, pale-faced young Franklin Burham, who hated his stepmother. He denounced her and the marijuana ring to the police, from whom last week reporters pried the story. Rosa and Juan, arrested, confessed. Nelson got away. Police felt that they had found the drug's main source in Ecuador.

* The cockroach, the cockroach, Doesn't want to travel on, Because she hasn't, oh no, she hasn't, Marijuana for to smoke.

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