He made it in an Olomouc hospital pharmacy for patients with ulcers and shingles. He left for Jerusalem in 1990, and nobody was left who could make it.
For twenty years, the cannabis tincture dispensed at the teaching hospital in Olomouc was made by one man. It went to patients with mouth ulcers, with herpes simplex, with shingles, with pressure sores. This was not a trial or an exemption. It was ordinary pharmacy work in an ordinary hospital dispensary, and it went on until 1990.
Lumír Ondřej Hanuš was born in that city on 20 November 1947. He studied at Palacký University there. In December 1970 a professor named Zdeněk Krejčí needed an assistant for research on cannabis, and Hanuš took the position. He had books about medicinal plants at home. He knew cannabis was one of them.
"It was good luck that I was at the correct time at the correct place," he says.
He had inherited something. Two decades earlier, in the same faculty, Jan Kabelík and František Šantavý had established that substances in cannabis were antibacterial, and isolated cannabidiolic acid. Krejčí was Kabelík's successor. The tincture came down that line.
Asked who made him, Hanuš names Krejčí and Šantavý. "They formed my love to cannabis," he says, "and then they formed my scientific knowledge. This was just base for cannabis research."
Šantavý worked out the absolute configuration of THC in 1964, the same year the molecule was first isolated in Israel. Neither man is widely known outside the field. Hanuš brings them up unprompted, twice.
Krejčí found him rather than the other way round.
"He came to our faculty of natural science, where I studied analytical chemistry, and was trying to find somebody who can work with cannabis. This was the first kick."
The second was the man whose bench he inherited. Kabelík had been a physician, a chemist and a pharmacist at once.
"So he combined all necessary knowledge — as chemistry, as medicine, as pharmacy. So it was a really very strong base to start to work on this."
In 1961 the state stopped cannabis research. Krejčí carried on.
"He had no problem, because he was also expert of the laboratory of the United Nations, and he visited the sessions."
Cannabis was cultivated on two separate sites in the city, fibre types and drug types, and nobody hid it.
"Police knew it, everybody knew it," Hanuš says. "And they knew that we prepare also extracts for drugstore. It was hospital drugstore. And they prepare products which they use for treatment of patients."
In 1990 he left for Jerusalem, to do a year of research at the Hebrew University.
"After I left, there was nobody to prepare this extract. So it became unfortunately illegal."
He says the word unfortunately the way a chemist says it. Flat. It is the only editorial in the sentence.
Two years later, in a laboratory in Jerusalem, a team isolated a molecule the human body makes for itself. It binds to the same receptor as THC. William Devane and Hanuš did the isolation; Raphael Mechoulam ran the laboratory and had nearly shelved the project after a year without result. The compound was named anandamide, from the Sanskrit for bliss, and it was the first endogenous cannabinoid ever described.
It is the work Hanuš is introduced by. It is not the work he talks about.
Asked what matters in the field, he does not name a discovery. He describes a shape.
"All knowledge about cannabis is like mosaic. And every scientist did some cubes in this mosaic. We never can forgot first pioneers, because it start, first chemistry of cannabis start more than 200 years ago. So all these scientists, even with small cubes, they contributed to have full mosaic."
Then, more plainly:
"For me nobody is big and nobody is small, because without this small contribution this cube was missing."
He counts in decades and institutions rather than papers. Twenty years at the medical faculty in Olomouc. Then the Hebrew University, where he is still listed as active. A research post at the University of Mississippi. Two long stays with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.
Asked how many scientific papers he has written, he does not know.
"You know, I don't calculate it. More than 100, no, it's for sure. But you must check Google Scholar. Or I don't know, maybe it's around 150. I don't know, something like that."
The Hebrew University's own research portal lists 173.
He adds, without prompting: "But not all these papers are very important."
He says he has no website.
"I prefer that anybody can find in databases, in internet, many informations about me, that anybody form his or her view on me. Not that I present something. You must decide who I am. Not I forced you to think what I am writing on internet."
There is a laboratory that carries his name and a page about his life on it. He did not build it.
The short questions get short answers, which is the point of them.
Morning or evening in the laboratory: early morning, then the whole day, and he laughs at himself for it.
Favourite smell among the plants: cannabis, because he has smelled it almost his whole life. "If I walk some streets and somebody smoke on the other side, I directly smell it." Then he corrects himself. The best smell is his mother's cooking, cabbage filled with meat and rice, in tomato sauce, the Hungarian dish she made.
The smallest thing anyone has done for him that meant a great deal: "If somebody, for something even small, told me thank you. It's the best thing. It's more than money."
Given unlimited funding and a good team, he would return to endometriosis. He is precise about why. Between ten and fifteen per cent of women of reproductive age have it, and some do not know, because it can take a physician years to recognise. "It's really crippling disease," he says.
The one luxury he would not give up is freedom. He says it in one word, then immediately overrules himself.
"But the most important is health. Nothing is more important than the health. Because if you are not healthy, you can be rich, but you are poor."
Asked what good health actually is, he does not reach for a definition from medicine.
"Good health, you get up in the morning without any pain. You are happy to have good connections, good friends."
The lesson he says cannabis has taught him is not about the plant.
"It's very hard to introduce cannabis to the medicine. It is very hard to legalize it for treatment. I am not talking about abuse. About treatment. It is very hard."
His explanation for the difficulty is not a scientific one.
"It should be one of the mainstream medicine, but because of the health, not because of the money. Not that it's allowed because they earn millions of dollars. Should be the most important, because many persons became healthy after use of medical cannabis. Unfortunately it's not like that, because everybody wants profit."
His current work is stopped. He is careful to say why, and he does not blame anyone.
"This research was influenced by covid and by war, so it a little bit stuck. Unfortunately with covid many companies, they crashed because they didn't have money."
He calls it a short break. He still lectures abroad. He still studies the plant. He is looking for the right place to continue, and he hopes it is Jerusalem.
He is impatient with people who want results faster than results come.
"I know that people like to have answer directly the same year. It's not such easy. But results can be fascinating. Who knows?"
He describes the work the way a man describes a distance he has already walked most of.
"It's a run for long distance."
At the end he is asked for one sentence of wisdom for the world. He gives three, and none of them mention the plant he has spent fifty-five years on.
"Be healthy. Pray for peace. Pray for health of any person."