Israel takes step toward allowing export of medical marijuana

An Israeli government committee gave an initial nod on Sunday for the export of medical marijuana in what could be a windfall for companies in Israel, widely regarded as a leader in research in the field.

A government statement announcing the vote said it could take months for the legislation to make its way through parliament.

In the United States, 28 states have legalized marijuana for medical use and since 2012, Colorado, Alaska, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, D.C. have also approved marijuana for recreational use. The market there, by some estimates, will reach $50 billion over the next decade.

Israel is widely regarded as one of the world leaders in medical marijuana research, even though the local market is small. Only 23,000 people have Health Ministry permits to purchase medical cannabis from nine licensed suppliers, creating a market of $15 million to $20 million at most.

Saul Kaye, CEO of iCAN, a private cannabis research hub in Israel, said there are about 50 Israeli medical marijuana companies active in many aspects of the industry, from agriculture to delivery devices, such as inhalers.

Kaye estimated that international investments in Israeli companies reached about $100 million in 2016.

Last month, Israel moved toward decriminalizing small-scale personal use of marijuana and authorities are supportive of research. Israeli Health Minister Yakov Litzman supports medical cannabis usage and has introduced steps to ease its prescription and sale.

(Reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Source:  Reuters


A FLOURISHING $40 MILLION MEDICAL MARIJUANA INDUSTRY HELPS ISRAELIS FORGET

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Holocaust survivor Moshe Rute, a resident at Hadarim nursing home, where he smokes cannabis daily to fight chronic pain. (Shira Rubin)

On a recent afternoon in Kibbutz Naan, near the city of Rehovot, Israel, Moshe Rute took a hefty puff from his pot pipe, with the blessing of the government. His hands stopped convulsing, and he drifted into the story of how cannabis had done for him something that no person could—help him forget. A “Holocaust child,” he said the memories of his past—of hiding in a chicken barn in his native France to escape the Nazis, and the later death of his wife—haunted him.

For years Rute, 81, had been silenced by his psychological baggage and unsuccessful at sleep. But in 1988, when he arrived at the Hadarim nursing home in central Israel, where he was prescribed medical cannabis for a cocktail of ailments, he finally “opened up,” he said. “When I was a child my imagination saved me. I was alone, talking to the chickens. What saved me here was the cannabis.”

After the hourlong smoking session on the porch, we retreated into a spartan, ground-floor room, where the creative by-products of his drug use were on display. They included sketches of chickens and of his late wife, as well as black-and-white Pollock-style splatter paintings. He’d already completed three books.

In the United States, marijuana has been approved for medical use in 18 states and the District of Columbia and for recreational use in two states, but with federal statutes still criminalizing the drug, the future of the substance remains unclear. In Israel, meanwhile, the $40-million-per-year medical-marijuana industry has flourished.

Illegal for recreational use, today medical cannabis is prescribed to some 11,000 Israeli patients, up from 1,800 in 2009, according to the Israeli Health Ministry. It is used to treat an extensive list of illnesses including cancer, Parkinson’s, Tourette syndrome, and PTSD. While government attempts to limit use have sparked a heated debate, legislation is still relatively liberal. In May, Health Minister Yael German announced that an additional 11 doctors would be certified to prescribe cannabis—bumping up the number to 19—by the end of the year.

While rabbinic support for medical cannabis has long existed in Israel, government regulation is relatively new. The issue was raised for the first time in 2009, in the wake of a documentary titled Prescribed Grass, directed by Zach Klein. “I made the movie because my mother was suffering from cancer, and she was afraid to take hashish, afraid about the long-term effects,” Klein told me. “It was time that Israel woke up.”

He said the term marijuana has proven a detrimental moniker, conjuring up connotations of street crime, whereas the word cannabis has historical precedent in the Bible. He added that an accurate, shared vocabulary is needed for both politicians and patients to feel comfortable discussing the drug.

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Rivke Holop, 85, prefers the yogurt preparation. Photo: Dan Balilty

With chief nurse Inbal Sikorin, Klein built the Hadarim nursing home. Bustling trays of cannabis—in liquid, food, and pill form—for the lunchtime crowd, Klein and Sikorin agreed that the “munchies effect” is one of the drug’s most beneficial perks. Many patients here suffer from chronic pain from chemotherapy or other treatments and are at serious risk of having dangerously low body weight. Thus, Sikorin said, allowing the use of medical cannabis is an issue of medical ethics.

Sikorin remembered that in the days before marijuana was common treatment at Hadarim, “We had learned to prolong life, and we did that very well, but it wasn’t clear to me what we could offer them in terms of quality of life. We would always give them medicines that weren’t completely perfect. So, we would add other medicines, and they had their own side effects. This was, also, not at all cost-effective.” Of the 16 patients receiving medical cannabis, there are a few special cases, like half-paralyzed and wheelchair-ridden Rom (he requested his last name be omitted for privacy), 90 years old. He can’t speak or stay awake for more than a few seconds, let alone swallow a pill, and thus consumes the marijuana via vaporizer.

As Sikorin and I watched him inhale, we saw his eyes immediately light up. He yawned, to the delight of Sikorin. His wife Rachel prodded him to finish his third cannabis balloon, so that he could join her for lunch.

The pot doled out here comes from an organic greenhouse in the Galilee called Tikkun Olam, referring to the Jewish principle of healing the world. The largest of eight other government-sponsored cultivation digs, the cannabis farm supplies about 2,000 patients across Israel and goes by the motto derived from Psalm 118, “This is God’s doing; it’s marvelous in our eyes.”

At Tikkun Olam, crossbred products include a strain that reportedly inspires the most powerful high in the world and another that provides none at all. The latter is achieved by isolating the tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, responsible for the “high,” and upping the concentration of the non-psychoactive cannabidiol, or CBD, which has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. In the 1960s Israel was a world leader in research on marijuana and its components under the so-called grandfather of cannabis, professor Raphael Mechoulam, at Hebrew University, who first isolated the THC component.

Dr. Ruth Gallily, an immunology professor at Hebrew University who has researched CBD for 15 years, said the drug offers still unknown potential in treating neurological and physical illnesses. “Where the THC binds to the brain receptor, giving the high feeling, the CBD doesn’t bind, making it effective without toxicity,” she said. “It can be used for liver inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, and even diabetes type 1, which afflicts millions of people.” But the fact that it is a plant, she said, and is therefore harder to control and impossible to patent, makes it an unattractive investment for medical companies.

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Another Haradim resident receives cannabis injections directly into his stomach. Photo: Getty Images

Dr. Reuven Or is the director of the bone-marrow transplant department at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where he said medical cannabis was first used. He said that holes in the bureaucratic system and demands on already overburdened doctors to handle prescription requests are compensated by “independent organizations and a lot of grace.” He maintains, though, that there’s still a long way to go in fully understanding the drug.

At the distribution center at Hadassah Hospital, patients, including young children, attend group classes on how to take the drug. Every patient has a prescription and pays a monthly fee of 370 shekels (about 100 dollars). To register at distribution centers like this, patients must present a green card signed by their doctor, specifying their monthly cannabis allowance. Patients can also petition to have the monthly cost covered by their health-care providers.

Daniel Davis, a 34-year-old yoga practitioner who has salivary gland cancer, attends those classes as both a student and a teacher. A self-declared “former pothead,” he said he has a “calling” to demystify the drug for nervous first-timers. On the other hand, he said, “The kind of sneaky part in me is telling me that I beat the system. Not only am I getting marijuana from the government, they’re also subsidizing three quarters of the cost.”

Davis said marijuana was “a savior” in helping him gain back the 20 pounds lost during intensive bouts of chemotherapy. He maintains a vegan diet and does yoga and meditation when he can muster the strength, though his deteriorating condition has his doctors pessimistic. But even in facing this difficult truth, Davis said, marijuana helped. “It enables me to let go,” he said, “to not fight so much, not to struggle with the current reality.”

 

Source:  Tablet


Most medical marijuana users benefit from treatment, finds Ben-Gurion University study

 

The first study on the characteristics of patients with Health Ministry permission for treatment with medical marijuana – until now an unknown field – was revealed on Wednesday at the Sixth International Jerusalem Conference on Health Policy.

The conference was organized by the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research.

The study was led by Prof. Pesach Shvartzman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Health Sciences Faculty, who said even though medical cannabis has been legal for a decade and is licensed to more than 20,000 patients for relieving pain and other symptoms, “there has been no information about the users themselves.”

Shvartzman concluded that most users enjoy significant improvement in pain and function, but that the cannabis also caused side effects.

The study, carried out to observe new patients using the drug for two years, looked at their socioeconomic characteristics, disease profiles, the medical indication for use, dosages, treatment given to the patient before giving cannabis, treatment safety, side effects, response and effectiveness of treatment and the patient’s use of health services during the year prior to and the year following treatment.

The patients were observed at three pain clinics and were interviewed by phone during the first three months of their treatment and then every four months for two years.

Of 321 non-cancer patients, 47.4 percent were male and the rest female. Of the 78 cancer patients, 60% were male.

The mean age of the non-cancer patients was 50.1 years and of cancer patients 57.5 years.

Of the cancer patients, 47% of the non-cancer and 40% of the cancer patients were native Israelis.

A total of 53.8% of the non-cancer patients and 56.9 of the cancer patients were secular.

Forty percent of the non-cancer patients and 49.3% of the cancer patients were employed. Of the non-cancer patients, 30.4% and 47.9% of the cancer patients had an academic education. Of the non-cancer patients, 56.7% were married, compared to 65.3% of the cancer patients.

Some 42% of all the patients had received recommendations for medical cannabis from their doctors, while only 24% from a friend or family member.

The prescriptions for the drug were most commonly given by palliative medicine specialists, orthopedists, and other specialists and only a tiny minority (0.4%) from the family physician.

Fully 99.6% applied for marijuana supplies after taking conventional medications that were not effective.

Nearly 56% said they wanted it because the previous drugs caused side effects.

Three-quarters of patients smoked the marijuana, while nearly 21% used concentrations in oil and the rest via vaporization.

More than 77% suffered from side effects; the moist frequent were dry mouth (60.6%); hunger (60%); 44% high moods; 23% sleepiness; 28.6% fatigue; 32% red eyes; and 13% blurred vision.

Most of the users reported in later interviews that their pain, nausea, anxiety, appetite and general feeling had improved. Fewer than one in 10 stopped taking the drug after the first interview and 6% after the second interview because of side effects and because the treatment was not effective.

Meanwhile, the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has just reported on a study of adolescents’ use of non-medical marijuana in the US, which indicated that the number of teens with marijuana-related problems is declining. Similarly, the rates of marijuana use by young people are falling despite the fact more US states are legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana use and the number of adults using the drug has increased.

The researchers examined data on drug use collected from young people aged 12 to 17 over a 12-year span. They found that the number of adolescents who had problems related to marijuana – such as becoming dependent on the drug or having trouble in school and in relationships – declined by 24% from 2002 to 2013.