Israel Expands Their Medical Marijuana Program

Posted by Karri Gallaugher on November 8, 2010

Nov 082010

Israel may begin distributing medical marijuana though the country’s pharmacies as early as next spring if a recent recommendation by the Israeli Health Ministry Committee is accepted. Last week the Israeli Health Ministry committee on medical marijuana recommended that marijuana should be added to the list of medicinal drugs distributed throughout the countries pharmacies. If the recommendation is accepted by the ministry, medical marijuana could be available in pharmacies in six months.

Israel has already has recognized cannabis as a medical treatment and the country’s Health Ministry oversees a program that provides medical marijuana to hundreds of Israelis with an array of medical conditions. Up until recently, the program had only one participating doctor, a top researcher in the field, Dr. Yehuda Baruch. He currently receives just over 60 applications a month. The medical marijuana licenses are renewed at various intervals depending on the condition and Dr. Baruch’s advice. But in a sign that the program is expanding, five more doctors were authorized to prescribe cannabis in September.

So far, the number of Israelis who have been prescribed marijuana was two in 2000, 10 in 2005 and 700 in 2009. The current number of patients is over 2,000 but is expected to reach 5,000 by then end of the year with the help of the new doctors in the program. The Health Ministry estimates that tens of thousands of patients will be treated with cannabis in the next year. Patients in Israel are allowed to grow their own marijuana, or they can get state medical marijuana free of charge from one the ministry’s five authorized marijuana growers.

Israel can boast one of the most significant finds in cannabis research history. In 1964 78-year-old Professor Raphael Mechoulam was the first researcher in the world to isolate THC. In 1993 he led an Israeli-Scottish team in his lab at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem when they identified a previously unknown substance in the brain that functions much like THC itself called anandamide, from the Sanskrit word, ananda, meaning inner joy.