The 1960s was a big decade for cannabis: Images of flower power, the summer of love and Woodstock wouldnโt be complete without a joint hanging from someoneโs mouth. Yet in the early โ60s, scientists knew surprisingly little about the plant. When Raphael Mechoulam, then a young chemist in his 30s at Israelโs 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 hadnโt been worked out.
Mechoulam set to work.
The first hurdle was simply getting hold of some cannabis, given that it was illegal. โI was lucky,โ Mechoulam recounts in a personal chronicle of his lifeโs work, published this month in the Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. โThe 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.โ