Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jan 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Isabel Kershner

STUDYING MARIJUANA AND ITS LOFTIER PURPOSE

SAFED, Israel - Among the rows of plants growing at a
government-approved medical marijuana farm in the Galilee hills in
northern Israel, one strain is said to have the strongest psychoactive
effect of any cannabis in the world. Another, rich in
anti-inflammatory properties, will not get you high at all.

Marijuana is illegal in Israel, but farms like this one, at a secret
location near the city of Safed, are at the cutting edge of the debate
on the legality, benefits and risks of medicinal cannabis. Its staff
members wear white lab coats, its growing facilities are fitted with
state-of-the-art equipment for controlling light and humidity, and its
grounds are protected by security cameras and guards.

But in addition to the high-tech atmosphere, there is a spiritual one.
The plantation, Israel's largest and most established medical
marijuana farm - and now a thriving commercial enterprise - is imbued
with a higher sense of purpose, reflected by the aura of Safed, an
age-old center of Jewish mysticism, as well as by its name, Tikkun
Olam, a reference to the Jewish concept of repairing or healing the
world.

There is an on-site synagogue in a trailer, a sweet aroma of freshly
harvested cannabis that infuses the atmosphere and, halfway up a
wooded hillside overlooking the farm, a blue-domed tomb of a rabbinic
sage and his wife.

In the United States, medical marijuana programs exist in 18 states
but remain illegal under federal law. In Israel, the law defines
marijuana as an illegal and dangerous drug, and there is still no
legislation regulating its use for medicinal purposes.

Yet Israel's Ministry of Health issues special licenses that allow
thousands of patients to receive medical marijuana, and some
government officials are now promoting the country's advances in the
field as an example of its pioneering and innovation.

"I hope we will overcome the legal obstacles for Tikkun Olam and other
companies," Yuli Edelstein, the minister of public diplomacy and
diaspora affairs, told journalists during a recent
government-sponsored tour of the farm, part of Israel's effort to
brand itself as something beyond a conflict zone. In addition to
helping the sick, he said, the effort "could be helpful for explaining
what we are about in this country."

Israelis have been at the vanguard of research into the medicinal
properties of cannabis for decades.

In the 1960s, Prof. Raphael Mechoulam and his colleague Yechiel Gaoni
at the Weizmann Institute of Science isolated, analyzed and
synthesized the main psychoactive ingredient in the cannabis plant,
tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Later, Professor Mechoulam deciphered
the cannabinoids native to the brain. Ruth Gallily, a professor
emerita of immunology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has
studied another main constituent of cannabis - cannabidiol, or CBD -
considered a powerful anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety agent.

When Zach Klein, a former filmmaker, made a documentary on medical
marijuana that was broadcast on Israeli television in 2009, about 400
Israelis were licensed to receive the substance. Today, the number has
risen to about 11,000.

Mr. Klein became devoted to the subject and went to work for Tikkun
Olam in research and development. "Cannabis was used as medicine for
centuries," he said. "Now science is telling us how it works."

Israeli researchers say cannabis can be beneficial for a variety of
illnesses and conditions, from helping cancer patients relieve pain
and ease loss of appetite to improving the quality of life for people
with post-traumatic stress disorder and neuropsychological conditions.
The natural ingredients in the plant, they say, can help with
digestive function, infections and recovery after a heart attack.

The marijuana harvest, from plants that can grow over six feet tall,
is processed into bags of flowers and ready-rolled cigarettes. There
are also cannabis-laced cakes, cookies, candy, gum, honey, ointments
and oil drops. The strain known as Eran Almog, which has the highest
concentration of THC, is recommended for severe pain. Avidekel, a
strain rich in CBD and with hardly any psychoactive ingredient, allows
patients to benefit from the drug while being able to drive and to
function at work.

Working with Hebrew University researchers, the farm has also
developed a version in capsule form, which would make exporting the
drug more practical, should the law allow it.

Professor Mechoulam, now 82, said in an interview that he had been
urging producers over the years to grow cannabis with less THC and
more CBD, something in which nonmedical marijuana growers had little
interest. He said what Tikkun Olam had done was not great science but
"a very practical development."

In Israel, he said, research in the field is "definitely a work in
progress," and he cautioned, "Science is not a 100-meters Olympic
race; it is not who is first on the line that is important."

The real advances, he said, are being made not on farms but in
laboratories around the world, including in the United States and
Europe. The professor, who collaborates with many teams abroad, said
that chances were that in the next few years well-defined mixtures of
the compounds, refined into something more like a medical drug, would
replace today's medicinal marijuana.

In the meantime, he said, offering products with different levels of
key ingredients, as Tikkun Olam does, "is going towards personalized
medicine."

Yet experts say that many medical professionals in Israel remain
skeptical and are reluctant to encourage patients to use marijuana, be
it because of conservatism or a lack of knowledge about its potential
benefits. Obtaining a personal-use license from the Health Ministry
for a patient requires a special effort by doctors and can take more
time than some patients have.

Yuval Tuby Zolotov, who works at Tikkun Olam's small dispensary and
instruction center in Tel Aviv, said that the license for his mother,
who died of cancer three years ago, was finally approved as the family
sat shiva, the traditional weeklong mourning period, after her death.

Still, there are stories of transformation. Of children whose pain
dissolved with a cannabis candy. Or of the Hadarim retirement home at
Kibbutz Naan in central Israel, where one of the residents began
taking marijuana several years ago and started a trend.

"A few years ago, we found we had lost the way," said Inbal Sikorin,
the chief nurse at Hadarim. "We had learned to prolong life, but
without quality." The residents became part of a project, with Tikkun
Olam, to test the broader use of marijuana, Ms. Sikorin said. As a
result, she said, the feeding tubes are gone and the residents are
much less restless.

"It was as if there were divine intervention," she
said.

In a story the mystics of Safed would appreciate, Ms. Sikorin related
the case of a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor at the home whose hands
and forearms had long been frozen in an upward, twisted position.
After taking medical cannabis, the nurse said, she joined a tai chi
class. 
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