I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease during my military service. Conventional treatment ran out. I first applied to Israel's Ministry of Health for a medical cannabis license in 2000 — and after four years of back-and-forth, building a four-hundred-page medical case alongside a six-hundred-page personal cannabis-and-Crohn's journal, the license was granted in 2004. The seventh ever issued in the country, and the first granted by direct application without a prior court order.
That made me a patient. The next twenty years made me an educator. In 2005 I co-founded the Israel Medical Cannabis Association. In 2008 the Ministry of Health licensed me as Israel's first Medical Cannabis Instructor. I built the first structured patient-education program in the country, then the first nurses' training program for medical cannabis care. I've spoken to the Czech Parliament before they legalized in 2013, helped draft the Catalan medical-cannabis framework with FACC (adopted by Catalonia and de facto recognized by Spain), and consulted with Tikun Olam, BOL Pharma, Bazelet Group, IMC, and the rest of Israel's cannabis-medicine ecosystem.
Along the way I became an inventor — US Patent US11346051B2 covers a cold terpene-printing technology I developed for the cannabis industry. I also built and run WIZDOM CBD, a CBD cosmetics line of oils and skincare products, which has shipped over 100,000 units to date and continues to grow. None of that work is what I'm proudest of. What I'm proudest of is in the patients I've sat with — the patients who learned how to bring cannabis under their own control instead of letting their dispensary decide for them.
Today I'm building WIZDOM — the practice and the internal tools that let me do this work at the scale a single human shouldn't be able to. The tools use AI. I build them cautiously, use them internally first, and only release them to patients and practitioners worldwide once they've earned it. Cannabis taught me that powerful systems need human accountability around them. AI is the same lesson, again — and the same discipline.