2004The seventh license
I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease during my military service. Conventional treatment did what it does — biologics, steroids, the long pharmacological corridor — and for me, like for many Crohn's patients, it ran out before the disease did.
I first applied to Israel's Ministry of Health for a medical cannabis license in 2000. What followed was four years of back-and-forth — medical opinions, regulatory questions, more documentation. By the time the file closed in 2004 it was a roughly four-hundred-page case: a book's worth of medical-specific evidence on cannabis, on Crohn's, and on the pharmacological gap conventional treatment had left for me. Alongside it was another six hundred pages I had been writing on my own — a daily journal of how cannabis was actually working in my body, what dose, what cultivar, which symptoms responded, which didn't.
In 2004 the license was granted — the seventh ever issued in Israel, and the first granted by direct application without a prior court order. The six patients before me had each had to litigate their way to it. I got mine on the documentation alone.
I did not set out to build anything. I set out to feel better. The building came after, because once I was inside the system I could see how broken it was for everyone else.
2005–2008The advocacy years
In 2005 I co-founded the Israel Medical Cannabis Association (IMCA), the country's first patient-advocacy organization for medical cannabis. I served as chairman until 2016.
The organization was where the policy work happened. The ground work was patient education. Over and over again I'd watch a newly-licensed patient go to a dispensary, get handed a product, and come back six weeks later having quit because "it didn't work." The product was fine. The patient education was zero.
Back when I started building patient education for medical cannabis in Israel, there was no YouTube to learn from. There was no real online patient education at all. I was isolated in Israel, with internet access and direct email contact to a very small group of OGs in other countries — the few cannabis patients and researchers anywhere in the world who were on email back then.
That forced a different kind of work. I had to collect data. I had to work alongside the producers and the Ministry of Health, in conjunction with both, to make any of it function together. We built the reporting tools and the protocols by mutual consent and open discussion. We mapped where the gap actually was — the Ministry felt patients were being treated without education, the producers had no education materials to give physicians (the way pharma companies routinely do) — and then we filled the gap, piece by piece, until what was missing was a system. That was the work I was tasked with, and the system I built.
In 2008 the Israel Ministry of Health licensed me as Israel's first Medical Cannabis Instructor — the formal credential. That same year I built the country's first structured patient-education program. In 2012, the first nurses' training program.
2012The Czech Parliament
By 2012 the work had a track record other countries wanted to look at. Czech officials were preparing to legalize medicinal cannabis (which they did in 2013), and I was invited to address the Czech Parliament's Health Committee. Hospodářské noviny covered the visit:
Czech Radio covered it too. Between 2013 and 2015 I worked with the Federation of Associations for Cannabis in Catalunia (FACC) on the regulatory framework that would govern medical cannabis in the region — adopted by the Catalan government and de facto recognized by the Spanish government. I am not a politician. I show up, share what worked and what didn't, and leave the rest to the people whose job it is to legislate.
2012–2013Silistra research facility (Bulgaria)
In parallel to the policy work, I led a cannabis research facility in Silistra, Bulgaria, operating under a research license that covered 42,000 cannabis plants. The work spanned proprietary research for client companies and original research of my own.
Two years of running the facility produced the dataset and the questions that pushed me, after, into the deep work on terpenes — the chemistry that would become the spine of both the patent and the patient-education program revisions that followed.
2008–2015The operators
The patient-education programs I'd built were adopted by Tikun Olam, BOL Pharma, Bazelet Group, and IMC — Israel's largest licensed cannabis operators. Across those programs, the producer-side data showed that 50% of patients without structured onboarding dropped off within four months. With the structured onboarding and coaching I designed, the same 50% drop-off point moved to thirty-four months. (Includes natural attrition.)
The programs were eventually discontinued for internal operational reasons. The patient outcomes were not in dispute. Ten thousand patients personally guided. Over a hundred thousand onboarded through the system at large.
2016–2022Terpenes research
Six years of focused research on terpene content in cannabis, and on how terpenes interact in synergy with cannabinoids. The output was a working impact map — which combinations produce which clinical effects, in which patients, at what relative ratios.
That research went straight back into the patient-education program. It enabled a much more personalized path to strain selection — picking by chemovar and chemical profile rather than by THC percentage or anecdote — and made product selection faster and more accurate than anything we had before.
2018–2024The terpene brand and the CBD lines
From 2018 onward I focused on the terpene-technology side of the work — building the brand, developing the cold terpene-printing process, and pushing the patent application toward grant (it was granted in 2022 as US11346051B2). The CANNABOOST line came out of that work and went into production.
In parallel I built and operate WIZDOM CBD — a CBD cosmetics line of oils and skincare products, which has shipped over 100,000 units to date and continues to grow. I also collaborate on additional CBD product lines distributed in Europe and Israel.
Different products, same thread: cannabis is a complex system, and what you put into a body — what cultivar, what cannabinoid profile, what terpene blend, in what form, at what dose — actually matters. The work was always about closing the gap between what cannabis can do and what patients are typically given.
NowWIZDOM
Today I'm building WIZDOM. It is the smallest and most focused thing I've ever done. Fifty active clients at a time. A premium 1:1 practice for the cannabis patients who tried the system and watched it fail them — the patients who were told to come back and report and never were given a way to come back, or anyone to report to.
The cannabis side of WIZDOM is what twenty years has prepared me for. The internal tools are new. They use AI. I build them cautiously, use them internally first, and only release them to patients and practitioners worldwide once they've earned it.
The same lesson applies: the appearance of understanding is not understanding. Powerful systems — cannabis, AI, anything — need human accountability around them. The fix is not less of the system. It is more accountability inside it.
That is what WIZDOM is built to honor.