A scientist, a magazine editor and a man who was jailed for his garden, sitting in the city where the first of them started work on the plant in 1970. Three countries, three laws, and the same complaint in all three.
The number Božidar Radišič keeps returning to is an attendance figure.
"We have like 30, 40 nurses in one seminar, and maybe one — or not even one — doctor or physician."
He has been running these in Slovenia for years. The sixth was booked for that October, at the faculty. The nurses come. The doctors, who are the only people who can actually write the prescription, do not.
"The problem is how to animate doctors to actually attend the seminars."
He turns it into a question for the other two, which is the reason the three of them are sitting together.
"I wonder from where they get the information in Czech and in Israel."
They were in Olomouc, which is not an incidental choice of city. Lumír Hanuš began working on cannabis at the university there in December 1970, two decades before he co-identified anandamide. Lukáš Hurt studied at the same university and now edits a cannabis magazine from a village outside it. Radišič had come from Slovenia.
Between them they were describing three legal systems: one that works better than it looks, one that barely works, and one that had just been made worse.
Hurt gave the Czech position, and it starts as the good news.
Medical cannabis was legalised in 2013. Ninety per cent of the cost is covered by public health insurance. And the bottleneck — that only specialists could prescribe — had just been removed.
"Since April this year, general practitioners are allowed to prescribe for chronic pain. So we have about four or five thousand GPs in the Czech Republic. This was also very important news."
He is careful not to oversell it.
"We are again seeing some bureaucratic hurdles and problems with the system and the computer stuff. So the increase is not as we would like to see. But it's still progress."
He explains what the old restriction did to patients, and it is a small absurdity with a large consequence.
"If you have chronic Crohn's disease, the gastroenterologist is not allowed to prescribe it. So these patients actually have to go to the doctor who treats pain and get it for pain instead of for their primary disease."
Then he names the thing that he thinks matters more than any possession limit.
"I personally don't think the biggest obstacle is how much cannabis you can have at home. What about the other regulations — for jobs, for traffic?"
"If you drive and you have some THC in your blood, you can still lose your licence. Although you are an official patient. Or you used cannabis three days before — but still, if they find it in your blood, then you have problems."
Radišič adds the Slovenian version, which reaches further.
"In Slovenia, if you are in the public sector and you are tested positive for THC, you can lose your job."
Then the point that makes both facts into one problem.
"Who will take cannabis if you cannot drive, you cannot go to your job?"
The education question comes back around, and Hanuš answers it from Israel with a flat no.
The endocannabinoid system, he says, is not in the curriculum. Doctors who know anything learned it at conferences, in their own time, from patients.
"Physicians participate in the seminars and conferences. And then in treatment of patients they have experience, which is very important. But it's not part of curriculum."
Hurt says the Czech version is the same shape.
"In universities there is no kind of lessons about it. We have a few doctors, pioneers, who started some ten, twelve years ago. In the beginning they had hundreds of patients, and then they actually started to teach other doctors."
"So it's spreading naturally like this."
He is more optimistic than Radišič about demand, and his reason is practical rather than hopeful.
"When they don't have enough information, they are afraid to do something wrong. It's understandable that they are afraid. But if you give them the option to learn, they usually turn up."
Hanuš's example of what the system does to a doctor who does learn is the sharpest thing said at the table.
He had been working on cannabis for endometriosis — a condition affecting a large share of women of reproductive age, which causes severe pain and can affect fertility. A physician he knew was treating such women.
The doctor prescribed within the legal range. He prescribed at the top of it.
"He used amounts which are legal — but on the top, not on the bottom. So he had so many problems."
"He's not a physician now. He's just an adviser at some company."
Hanuš's summary of his own country is not the one Israel's reputation would predict.
"Even in Israel it's not that open with cannabis."
He explains who does get a permit easily, and why that is not the good news it sounds like.
"If you have terminal stage, nobody sees a problem. They give you directly. But it's too late. In terminal stage of cancer, they can give you anything."
And he objects to a reform that was meant to be an improvement. Israel moved from prescribing named strains to prescribing by cannabinoid content.
"Before, the grower gave to the patient several strains, and then the patient chose which one is best for him or her. But today it's not according to the strains, it's according to the amount of THC, CBD, CBN. And it's not a good approach — because if you have several strains with the same amounts, they work differently with different diseases."
The conversation turns to what is actually being sold, and this is where all three agree without qualification.
Radišič reports what Slovenia's own testers have found.
"They found already the fentanyl on the dried flowers, and the synthetic cannabinoids — which I don't like to name cannabinoids. They don't have anything together with cannabinoids. It's just a name."
Hurt had been at a university laboratory in Prague two weeks earlier and had been told something that had changed the researchers' own view of the risk.
"For recent years they were testing for pesticides, residues and stuff, and they thought that was the biggest danger. But they say in the last two years the market is overflowing with synthetic cannabinoids and other compounds."
"They don't even know what the compounds are. But the products are full of it. They just spray it on the flower and sell it around all countries."
The laboratory cannot keep up, and he explains why in one line.
"They have standards for twenty synthetic cannabinoids. But they keep receiving new ones."
His conclusion is not the one a legalisation argument usually produces.
"From that point of view, it's safer to grow your own than to buy it in the streets in Prague."
Hanuš makes the same argument from the other end.
"If it's legal and you can buy it, you know everything. You can be sure you cannot be overdosed. So you can use it safely, as a patient or as a recreational user."
Asked what actually creates a black market, the table gives a two-word answer and then a third word.
Prohibition. Stupid laws. And overtaxing.
"If you go too much, of course you will have a black market. And a black market is not controlled — not the quality, not anything."
California is offered as the example of the third one, and the diagnosis holds up: sales there have fallen three years running, and an excise rise in 2025 was reversed within months.
Radišič's own news was a law that was about to take effect, and he was more scathing about it than about anything else in two hours.
"In Slovenia we also got now the new law about cannabis for research purposes, which is also nonsense. It is the only plant now with its own law about research."
"It's very nice on the paper. But the hell is in details."
The detail he objects to is the one that touches his own project directly.
"You know that we send some seeds to space. And according to the new law, if I grow seeds in Slovenia after the research project, they should be destroyed. And this is the biggest stupidity."
"How can you then bring those seeds to the field, if you have to destroy the material?"
He sets it against the thing his country did the year before, which he believes gives him a mandate the law ignores.
"Now this result, almost 52% for personal use. That was the only referendum in Europe about personal cannabis use."
Hanuš, asked which cannabis myth he would most like to kill, says the target is not really a myth.
"I tried this for twenty years. There are too many myths about cannabis. And all those myths are the product of seventy years or more of propaganda about the stupidity."
"It's hard to overthrow something that doesn't exist."
Then he names what he actually thinks is in the way, and it is not belief.
"It's hard to find a bureaucrat who is ready to spit into his own bowl."
He extends it into the observation the whole table had been circling.
"In Czech, the general public is in favour of cannabis. In Slovenia, everywhere. So who is actually making all those obstacles? We all want to. But somebody is stopping us all the time, all over the world."
Hurt's closing argument is an absence rather than an achievement.
"I don't see any studies claiming that people are now driving under the influence and killing each other in huge numbers, or that all the youth are using cannabis from morning to evening."
"So it can be done. And the sky doesn't fall."
The last observation belongs to Radišič, and it is bleaker than it sounds.
"They have way more serious problems with fentanyl and other drugs. So nobody cares about cannabis anymore."
Hurt agrees, and does not pretend it is a victory.
"That's how it should be."