Medical Marijuana Companies Use Israel As Testing Ground
Israel is becoming a center of American medical marijuana production and research, as U.S. companies move their grow houses and R&D operations to the Jewish State. It is much easier to conduct medical trials on drugs made from cannabis in Israel than it is in the U.S., where companies must spend several years getting approval from federal agencies to even do basic research on marijuana.
“The seriousness with which the Israeli scientific community approaches this is incomparable,” Charles Pollack, director of the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told Rolling Stone. “Israel is a hotbed of quality cannabis research.”
Over 50 American companies currently have medical marijuana R&D operations running in Israel, and 2016 saw over $125 million of investment from U.S. companies in Israeli cannabis operations. One Israeli firm specializing in cannabis R&D expects total investment in Israeli cannabis companies to reach $1 billion over the next ten years.
Israel’s government invests millions of dollars annually into medical marijuana research. American companies often choose Israel as the place to run the early stages of their clinical trials for medical marijuana-based drugs because those same trials would almost certainly be rejected by the FDA.
Even the National Institutes of Health funds hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical marijuana research in Israel each year.
Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO