In 1999, Gil was a soldier in the Israeli military. Crohn's disease took 37 kilograms from his body in three months. Conventional medicine had run out of options. He weighed less than his gear. The doctors were out of ideas.
Medical cannabis stopped the decline. It was not yet a regulated medicine in Israel. There was no Ministry of Health programme, no licensed supply, no protocol — just a few desperate patients and a handful of physicians willing to sign letters. The previous six people in the country who had obtained a licence had all needed a court ruling to force the Ministry's hand.
Gil spent four years on the paperwork instead. In 2004, his direct application to the Ministry of Health was approved. No judge. No court order. He became Patient #7 — and the administrative pathway he opened became the route every Israeli patient has taken since.
The medicine worked. But patients were being handed flowers and oils with no dose, no titration, no guidance — and then being blamed when it didn't work. That wasn't medicine. That was abandonment with a prescription pad.
In 2005, he founded the Israel Medical Cannabis Association — the country's first structured patient advocacy and education body. In 2008, the Ministry of Health licensed him as Israel's first Medical Cannabis Instructor. That same year he built Israel's first formal patient education programme. In 2012, the first nurses' education programme. The clinical onboarding system he developed was adopted by Tikun Olam, BOL Pharma, Shibolet, and IMC — and moved average patient retention from four months to thirty-four.
He has personally supervised more than 10,000 patients. More than 100,000 have been onboarded through the system he built. He has advised the governments of Israel, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria; addressed the Czech Parliament in 2012; and holds a US patent (US11346051B2) for cold terpene-printing technology. He studied at Ben Gurion University and, later, at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design — through chemotherapy.
He does this work because he knows exactly what it feels like to be the patient nobody could help.