Raphael Mechoulam, The Israeli Godfather Of Thc

[zachw]

It’s not every day that you can waltz down to police headquarters and pick up a few kilos of weed—unless, that is, you’re Raphael Mechoulam, the man who discovered THC, the chemical that gets you high (and provides medicinal relief to people with serious ailments).

 

Mechoulam, 85, recalls one day in the early ’60s in Israel, as he rode a bus from Tel Aviv to Rehovot, where he worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He remembers thinking to himself: Nobody on the bus realizes the smell emanating from this bag is from five kilograms of “superb, smuggled Lebanese hashish,” he said in a 2007 interview in the journal for the Society for the Study of Addiction. It was, in fact, a gift he had received from the police.

 

As a young researcher fascinated with biology and chemistry, Mechoulam had requested to study cannabis, a prevalent yet poorly understood plant used for hundreds of years for medicine and recreation. Knowing that the police usually burned smuggled hashish, he asked the director of the Weizmann Institute if he knew of any police who could supply hashish for the sake research. The director, who barely knew Mechoulam, made a phone call to the police and convinced them to let the “reliable” young scientist pick up some weed. 

 

After that first excursion from Tel Aviv, Mechoulam learned he and the investigative branch police head had unwittingly broken various laws. One couldn’t, as it turns out, just walk off with five kilos of weed. But given that he was an fledgling researcher, he got off with a simple apology. “Since then, I have been obtaining hashish from the police over 40 years,” Mechoulam said.

 

This month, the Israeli scientist was given a lifetime achievement award at CannMed 2016, a cannabinoid medicine conference at the Harvard School of Medicine. Indeed, the soft-spoken, bookish chemist, dubbed “The Man,” by High Times magazine, is an obvious recipient for such an award. In 1964, he discovered THC along with two colleagues, Yehiel Gaoni and Haviv Edery, and he has elucidated various other chemical compounds, or “cannabinoids” (Mechoulam coined the term), occurring in both the cannabis plant and the human body.

 

 

Here's the rest of the article.

 

Oh, more more important quote:

 

In 1982, Mechoulam said that if cannabis were legal, it would replace ten to twenty percent of all pharmaceuticals.[/size]

 

Oh, and one more update: don't forget to check out the 1 hour video embedded in the article. Here's the youtube link: The Scientist.

Edited April 20, 2016 by zachw