David Meiri dives into a drawer in his office and pulls out a handful of bags of cannabis: in his laboratory he has more than 1,000 different kinds of cannabis, which are kept in a safe.

Dr Meiri — universally known as Dedi — is in charge of the biggest cannabis research laboratory in the world.

Housed in an unassuming building on the Technion campus in Haifa, his lab is dedicated to exploring the vast therapeutic potential of various types of cannabis, algae and even the infamous “magic mushrooms” beloved of stoner hippies.

The research is particularly directed at the effect on cancer, inflammatory diseases and neural disorders.

“I have all the teams and the knowledge to take today any type of plant, and to try to connect between the herbal medicine known for thousands and years, and to explain to a physician how to use it in modern medicine,” he explains.

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Dr Dedi Meiri, right, at work in the lab

He works closely with hospitals in Israel, and as a result of an agreement with the Ministry of Health, all cannabis products grown for use on patients goes to the Technion lab first for analysis, to narrow down and refine the effectiveness of what people are being given.

Dr Meiri, whose proper title is principal investigator of the Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Cannabinoid Research at the Technion’s Faculty of Biology, took time off from his research work to explain how he became internationally renowned as “Cannabis Man”.

Modest and softly-spoken, though clearly passionate about his work, he declares: “I’m not reinventing the wheel. Plant biology and treatment has been known for many years.

Cannabis is the oldest plant cultivated by human beings, even before wheat: it was known as medicine by the Egyptians, Indians, it is mentioned seven times in the Bible, and Maimonides — who was a physician — wrote about its properties.”

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A cannabis plant

After his PhD, he worked in a cancer laboratory in Toronto before setting up his own lab at the Technion. “I started to work with a few plants used by the Israeli Bedouin for treating various conditions.

Then, about a year after I opened my lab, about seven years ago, there was a paper published by a Spanish group that showed that cannabis had an effect on breast cancer cells.”

Dr Meiri realised that this exactly applied to the kind of work he wanted to do, and applied to the Israeli Ministry of Health for a licence to study cannabis in his lab. The permit came through the next day — he was the first person to receive one.

“Cannabis was already available under prescription in Israel from 2007, so it’s a little strange that from 2007 until 2015 there was no real research on what it could do,” he says. “I had to do everything from scratch in my own lab.

Dr Meiri and his team quickly learned that there were many different kinds of cannabis which had different properties, and thus different effects on the human body. “Cannabis harbours specific molecules called cannabinoids. We have them in our bodies, too.”

He explains that in humans these cannabinoids act as a kind of regulator for things such as nausea, appetite, pain or sleep.

But he was keen to study the differences between different kinds of cannabis and how their ingestion might affect various conditions. As a result his lab created “a library of cannabis and cannabinoids”, the first in the world to do so.

“This moment changed the lab, because it meant that every physician, every clinical trial, every pharmaceutical company needed us,” he says.

“The big question is how to match the right type of cannabis to the right disease, and this is what we are doing today in our lab.

“I found myself working with a whole range of different projects, and my lab grew from seven people to 45 people in less than a year. My budget increased from $300,000 to $5 million in a year.”

His lab was “almost bursting”, so he marshalled his staff into teams, each investigating a different aspect of cannabis, such as how it how it affects the immune system, or sleep, or Alzheimer’s.

His methodology, he says, and the fact that his is a multi-disciplinary laboratory, has allowed him to extend his research beyond cannabis.

He’s currently growing more than 160 different types of so-called “magic mushrooms” and is optimistic about producing drugs from them, which will treat neurological conditions — and even mental health.

“I’m not religious, I’m a scientist. I want facts. But there are things that make sense to me. I’m here to try and help people — and I think there are plants which can do that. We can use them to do good things.”