Scientific highs and lows of cannabinoids
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The 1960s was a big decade for cannabis: Images of flower power, the summer of love and Woodstock wouldn't be complete without a joint hanging from someone's mouth. Yet in the early '60s, scientists knew surprisingly little about the plant. When Raphael Mechoulam, then a young chemist in his 30s at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, went looking for interesting natural products to investigate, he saw an enticing gap in knowledge about the hippie weed: The chemical structure of its active ingredients hadn't been worked out.
Mechoulam set to work.
The first hurdle was simply getting hold of some cannabis, given that it was illegal. I was lucky," Mechoulam recounts in a personal chronicle of his life's work, published this month in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. The administrative head of my Institute knew a police officer... I just went to Police headquarters, had a cup of coffee with the policeman in charge of the storage of illicit drugs, and got 5 kg of confiscated hashish, presumably smuggled from Lebanon."