It’s not every day that you can waltz down to police headquarters and pick up a few kilos of weed—unless, that is, you’re Raphael Mechoulam, the man who discovered THC, the chemical that gets you high (and provides medicinal relief to people with serious ailments).
Mechoulam, 85, recalls one day in the early ’60s in Israel, as he rode a bus from Tel Aviv to Rehovot, where he worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He remembers thinking to himself: Nobody on the bus realizes the smell emanating from this bag is from five kilograms of “superb, smuggled Lebanese hashish,” he said in a 2007 interview in the journal for the Society for the Study of Addiction. It was, in fact, a gift he had received from the police.
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