Lumír Hanuš

Lumír Hanuš spent the first twenty years of his career growing and analysing cannabis at a medical faculty in communist Czechoslovakia, where the plant was studied as a source of antibiotics. Then, in Raphael Mechoulam’s laboratory in Jerusalem, he helped find the molecule the brain makes for itself to do what THC does. Anandamide, which he and the American pharmacologist William Devane isolated in 1992, was the first endocannabinoid ever described.

In the Czech Republic he is also a public figure: a scientist who argued in parliament for medical cannabis years before it was allowed, and who still says, in his seventies, that prohibition has failed.

Olomouc: cannabis as an antibiotic

Hanuš was born in Olomouc, in Moravia, on 20 November 1947, and began studying at the science faculty of Palacký University there in 1966. The university already had an unusual tradition. At its medical faculty Zdeněk Krejčí of the department of hygiene and epidemiology, working with Jan Kabelík and František Šantavý, had described the antibacterial effects of cannabis extracts in the 1950s.

In December 1970 Hanuš became Krejčí’s assistant in research on cannabis and hashish, and from 1971 he grew cannabis for research on two fields in Olomouc. The extracts were used at the university hospital for mouth ulcers, herpes, shingles and bedsores. He later recalled spending twenty years at the faculty teaching hygiene, researching hemp and preparing extracts for its pharmacy. All this went on in a state whose criminal code punished private possession.

Year	Step
1970	Becomes Krejčí’s assistant in cannabis research
1974	Doctorate at Olomouc, on cannabinoids in Cannabis sativa
1978–79	Research at the University of Mississippi, on cannabis and coca
1984	Second doctorate, on cannabinoids in marijuana
1990	Moves to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
1992	Anandamide described in Science
2001	Noladin ether reported in PNAS
2018	Head scientist of Lumir Lab at Hadassah Medical Center

Jerusalem: the brain’s own cannabinoid

After the fall of the communist government Mechoulam, who had first described THC’s structure in 1964, invited Hanuš to the Hebrew University. He came for a year and stayed. Other laboratories had by then found the receptors to which THC binds; the question was what the body itself made to fit them.

Hanuš and Devane worked on it for about a year and a half. In December 1992 their paper in Science, with Aviva Breuer, Mechoulam and others, reported a substance from pig brain that bound to the cannabinoid receptor. They named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit ananda, bliss. Czech Wikipedia calls the discovery a fundamental breakthrough for research on endocannabinoids.

In 2001 he led the team that reported a third kind of endocannabinoid, 2-arachidonyl glyceryl ether or noladin ether, also from pig brain. It binds to the CB1 receptor and in mice caused sedation and a fall in body temperature. Wikipedia still describes it as a putative endocannabinoid. He has worked at the Hebrew University ever since, with spells at the US National Institutes of Health, and from 2018 has headed a cannabinoid laboratory named after him at Hadassah Medical Center.

An advocate at home

Hanuš has campaigned for medical cannabis in the Czech Republic for years. He spoke at two seminars on cannabinoid treatment in the Chamber of Deputies, on 8 April 2010 and 13 September 2011. Medical cannabis became available on prescription in 2013. Czech universities gave him honorary doctorates, Masaryk University in 2007 and Palacký University in 2011, and in 2012 Charles University gave him its addictology award.

His views are a scientist’s rather than an enthusiast’s. He calls cannabis a medicine but a palliative one, not a cure, and argues against smoking it. In a 2024 interview in Brno he contrasted Israel’s roughly 150,000 medical cannabis patients with Czech consumption counted in kilograms, and blamed bureaucracy. He also argued that legalisation suppresses the black market and makes the contents of products known, and that recreational use had not risen where cannabis was legalised. He advised young people to wait until about 25 before trying either cannabis or alcohol, and said he had never used cannabis recreationally himself.

Since 1 January 2026 adults in his home country may grow three plants and keep 100 grams at home.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}