Word: cinchona
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...Coming across" has been the leitmotiv of the Somoza regime. Cattlemen pay through import-&-export levies, marketing and slaughtering licenses. Gold-mine operators pay through special "taxes." Those who deal in mahogany, cinchona bark, milk, hides, tallow, cement and liquor pay in devious but nonetheless painful ways. Nicaraguans quip about an alphabetical list of Somoza rackets running from A to Z; they say that X stands for rackets unknown to the public...
...Totaquine, like quinine, is made from cinchona bark, but fewer bark components are discarded. What little comes from South American cinchona trees serves as a wartime substitute for quinine...
...savage coastal jungles there are many wild rubber trees. In the remote mountains and inland plains grows the cinchona tree (quinine); there grow also fique, pita and malba, all tough fibrous plants. With Colombia's aid the U.S. may replace some of the rubber, quinine and hemp lost to the United Nations in the Far East...
...Dutch successfully started planting cinchona trees in Java from one pound of South American seed. In recent years, after South American forests were plundered, the Dutch Kina Bureau controlled 95% of the world's quinine supply (33,000,000 oz.), kept the price pegged at an exorbitant 67? an oz. With Java now fallen to the Japanese, the supply of quinine to the U.S. (which has about 3,000,000 cases of malaria in the Southern States) has been cut off. So have all shipments to Russia, India and South America...
...develop new South American cinchona trees would take at least seven years. The world shortage of quinine would be less serious if the U.S. were able to produce large amounts of the synthetic drug atabrine, a coal-tar substitute for quinine, developed ten years ago. Almost as effective as quinine, atabrine is less suitable for large-scale use, for it is more toxic, should be given under a physician's supervision...