First Government-Hosted Medical Cannabis Conference Opens This Week

April 22, 2018 | Israel’s Ministries of Agriculture and of Health are hosting the first government-backed conference on medical cannabis this week near Tel Aviv, as the Israeli cabinet is set to vote in the coming weeks on approving medical cannabis exports after months of wrangling. Dubbed “Cannaan” – a combination of cannabis and Canaan, the biblical name of the region – the four-day conference is taking place April 23-26 at Kfar Hamaccabiah in Ramat Gan, just outside Tel Aviv. The program includes speeches by Israeli Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel, Yuval Landshaft, the Head of the Israeli Medical Cannabis Agency at the Israeli Ministry of Health, and Professor Raphael Mechoulam, the “father” of Israeli medical cannabis research. The event will also run sessions and panels on topics such as regulation, hi-tech agriculture, R&D, recent clinical studies, and the development of cannabis-based treatments and medicine. The website for the event, also called “Leading the Future,” says it is the “first international conference for medical grade cannabis.”