If Israel matters more in cannabis than its market size alone would suggest, the reason is scientific. The basic chemistry of the plant — what its active compounds are, and how the human body responds to them — was largely worked out in Israeli laboratories. That legacy gives the country a credibility in cannabinoid medicine that no amount of cultivation acreage could buy.
Raphael Mechoulam, the "father of cannabis research"
The central figure is Raphael Mechoulam (1930–2023), an organic chemist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Beginning his cannabinoid work in the early 1960s, Mechoulam and his colleagues were the first to isolate and describe the plant's defining molecules: cannabidiol (CBD) in 1963 and delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in 1964. Identifying THC's structure established, for the first time, exactly what made cannabis psychoactive — the foundation on which essentially all modern cannabinoid science rests.
Mechoulam's contributions went well beyond those first isolations. With Bill Devane and Lumír Hanuš, his group discovered anandamide in 1992, the first endogenous cannabinoid — a neurotransmitter the body produces itself — and helped map the broader endocannabinoid system, the receptor network through which cannabinoids act. That insight reframed cannabis from a single drug into a window onto a fundamental human biological system, opening research directions in pain, appetite, mood and neurological disease. When Mechoulam died in 2023 at 92, he was mourned internationally as the field's founding figure.
A research base, not just a researcher
Israel's advantage is that Mechoulam's work seeded an institution rather than ending with him. In 2017 the Hebrew University established the Multidisciplinary Center for Cannabinoid Research (MCCR), consolidating decades of accumulated expertise into a single hub. The centre is unusually large: it encompasses some 300 investigators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students working across roughly 40 laboratories on the university's campuses, spanning chemistry, pharmacology, neuroscience, agriculture and clinical medicine. Researchers there describe it as among the largest concentrations of cannabis-focused science anywhere in the world.
Several structural factors reinforce that lead: early legal access to cannabis for research purposes, a dense biotech and pharmaceutical ecosystem, and a regulatory framework (the IMC-GMP standards) that pushes the industry toward clinical-grade products. The result is a pipeline running from fundamental chemistry through to applied clinical trials within a single small country.
Current clinical work — PTSD at the centre
The most active and consequential strand of contemporary Israeli cannabis research concerns post-traumatic stress disorder. The interest is not only scientific but national: PTSD is one of the indications for which Israeli patients most commonly receive cannabis, and demand has risen sharply since the war that began in October 2023. Among IDF-disabled personnel, the number treated with medical cannabis for PTSD has increased dramatically, with thousands of soldiers receiving funded treatment — a real-world population that has drawn the attention of the Knesset and clinicians alike.
That demand is now feeding back into formal research. Studies examine whether cannabis meaningfully reduces nightmares, improves sleep and lowers anxiety in PTSD patients, and a new generation of rigorous trials is underway — including a Phase 2 randomised, placebo-controlled study of inhaled cannabis for PTSD designed to bring proper controls to questions that observational use cannot settle. Israel's combination of a large treated population and a deep research base makes it a natural setting for this work.
An honest caveat on the evidence
The strength of Israel's basic science should not be confused with settled clinical proof. For many conditions, including PTSD and chronic pain, the high-quality randomised evidence remains limited and at times conflicting, which is part of why Israel's own regulators have moved to tighten the program and demand more monitoring. The country's distinctive position is precisely that it is well placed to generate the rigorous evidence the field still lacks — a legacy of inquiry that began with one chemist isolating a molecule and now runs through hundreds of researchers and a growing roster of controlled trials.
This page is general information, not medical advice. Cannabis is not an established treatment for most conditions; consult a qualified physician.
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Compiled and reviewed by Tamar Levin, Editor. Sources are linked inline. This page is reviewed and refreshed periodically; it is informational and is not medical or legal advice.