Tikun Olam ("To heal the world") is a company that grows and supplies medical marijuana and is licensed and supervised by the Ministry of Health in Israel, the first of its kind in that country.
Tikun Olam started out as a non-profit in 2005. Then, after regulation in 2010, the company became a limited company. The company is primarily engaged in growing and developing medical cannabis and medical cannabis products. In 2012, the company garnered extensive local and global media coverage as the result of developing a strain of medical marijuana that contains a higher-than-normal amount of cannabidiol and less than 2% of the psychoactive substance THC, which was a new development in the industry.[1]
History and construction
At the end of the 1990s, Israel's Ministry of Health wanted to allow the use of cannabis for medical needs. Holding companies were granted licenses, and individual licenses were granted to certain users to grow their plants. For a while, cannabis was distributed for free in police stations, but this changed following police opposition.
In 2005 the founder of Tikun Olam, Tzahi Cohen, contacted the Ministry of Health and communicated the need to grow 100 cannabis plants for medical purposes (without compensation) on behalf of patients who had received permission to use cannabis and cannabis products for health reasons but had difficulty in obtaining cannabis itself. Growing medical cannabis, Cohen focused on raising one strain, licensed and supervised by the Ministry of Health and the Israel Police.