JERUSALEM (June 7) - If your joints are going to pot, a hashish derivative may be your salvation. A doctoral student at the Hebrew University's School of Pharmacy in Jerusalem has discovered that a substance taken from the hallucinatory drug can be effective as an anti-inflammatory drug for rheumatoid arthritis.

For her work with hashish as a therapeutic agent, Susanna Tchilibon - a 32-year-old immigrant from Milan - has been named a winner of one of this year's Kaye Prizes for Innovations and Inventions at the university. The prizes were awarded during the 64th meeting of the university's board of governors, which ended yesterday.

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In recent days the police raided a number of clubs throughout the country where, according to detectives, the drug ecstasy is sold and used. The police stepped up their activities following the death of at least four young people in recent months as a result of using the drug. Despite the angry responses of the club owners, the police operations are appropriate. The damage caused, especially to young people, justifies the special attention given to the problem by the law enforcement authorities.

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Smuggling Ecstasy The Hot New Industry

Jerusalem-Taking advantage of age-old diamond-smuggling routes, groups of Israeli criminals have become dominant in the illegal international trade of a newer commodity: the drug ecstasy.

From Tel Aviv to Antwerp and Amsterdam, to New York and Miami, Israeli smugglers have gained particular prominence within the growing ecstasy trade thanks to their familiarity with the route, the techniques for smuggling small objects and the tight communities that Israeli criminals tend to form in Israel and overseas, according to Israeli, Dutch and American law-enforcement officials and convicted Israeli ecstasy smugglers.

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It's going to be difficult to obtain just about any type of illegal drug in Israel for at least the next few months, after 25 of the country's most powerful drug smugglers and dealers were arrested in a raid early yesterday morning.

Dep.-Cmdr. Yossi Boker, head of anti-drug operations in the Central District police's central division, said those arrested included a Rahat resident who reputedly heads a gang of drug smugglers which supplies over half the Israeli market, and a suspect who boasted that he smuggled 800,000 ecstasy pills into Israel this year.

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(November 9) - Two Scotland Yard investigators have arrived here to examine a shipping container in the Port of Eilat in which four tons of marijuana were discovered on Sunday.

Scotland Yard got the information from Interpol and contacted Eilat police, asking whether they could investigate how the drugs were smuggled.

The drugs were found in a container which otherwise was filled with a cargo of wood. It came on the Zim line's Mombassa Star, which arrived from Durban, South Africa. The ship was due to unload the containers and put them on trucks for Haifa, where they were to be shipped to European countries. The suspect container was destined for Romania.

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Cannabis-like Compounds May Allow Newborn Babies To Thrive

CHEMICALS related to the active ingredient of cannabis might be vital for our survival. Naturally occurring cannabinoids in newborn mice trigger feeding, and without them the animals may die within days, says a biologist in Israel. She believes the chemicals could play a similar role in people.

Cannabinoids produced in the body are known to be natural painkillers. They also coordinate the dopamine system, helping to control movement. But smoking cannabis increases appetite, a property that is sometimes exploited to help cancer and AIDS patients. Cannabinoids have also been detected in human and cow's milk, and levels here are at their highest the day after giving birth. Ester Fride of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thought these observations might be a clue that naturally occurring cannabinoids are important in the early development of newborns.

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TEL AVIV (June 2) - Two Ha'aretz staffers were remanded for five days by Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court yesterday on suspicion they have been dealing drugs on IOL, a Web site owned by Ha'aretz.

The two, Rehavia Berman, 30, and David Hanoch, 29, both of Tel Aviv, used an IOL chat room about science fiction to make arrangements to supply marijuana to buyers, according to police.

Police declined to specify the quantity of drugs involved, saying only that it was "a large amount." They allegedly both bought and grew marijuana to sell. It is unclear how many people were involved in the operation.

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The IDF will soon embark on a stringent new program to to fight drug use among its troops, with the goal of testing every soldier at least once in his three-year stint.

IDF investigations of soldiers being released from service in recent years show a substantial rise in the number of soldiers using drugs. The average age soldiers first report using drugs is just over 17, about a year before their induction into military service. Drug-related disciplinary action files on soldiers who have sold or used drugs (mostly marijuana and Ecstasy) also continue to rise.

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Growing numbers of Israelis are downing the little pills that induce hugging, happiness and manic dancing. How long can the high last?

At 3 in the morning, Elon Daizada is hanging out in front of Allenby 58, one of Tel Aviv's hottest dance clubs. With his spiked yellow hair, black jeans and white patent-leather shoes, he's preening before a flamboyantly dressed bouncer, hoping to be admitted. Inside, the earsplitting thump of techno pop is shaking the foundations of the club, which is at the center of Israel's thriving rave culture. Tattooed, pierced--and in many cases fueled by the drug ecstasy--the clubbers writhe with abandon. Not long ago, Daizada was dodging Hizbullah guerrillas instead of fellow ravers. He finished serving his mandatory tour with the Israeli Army in southern Lebanon late last year, and is proud of his sacrifice. "I love this land like my own family," the 22-year-old says. "I would die for this country." But Daizada also reflects another powerful current among young Israelis: in an era of relative peace and prosperity, they are cutting loose--often by consuming drugs. Standing outside Allenby 58, Daizada marvels at the new Israel. "Something big is happening here," he says. "The old men can't tell us what to do anymore." Cocking his head, grinning and pumping a fist into the warm Mediterranean air, he can barely contain his enthusiasm: "Now we have ecstasy!"

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(February 16) - Education Minister Yossi Sarid and Knesset Education Committee chairman Zevulun Orlev, addressing a joint meeting of the Knesset Committee for the War Against Drugs and the Education Committee yesterday, agreed that drugs are becoming an epidemic in the nation's schools but disagreed about how to solve the problem.

"There's been a huge increase in pupils' use of many kinds of drugs over the last several years,"police deputy commander Suzy Ben-Baruch told the committees, singling out the psychedelic drug Ecstasy, in which the number of tablets confiscated by police has increased from 10 to 463,000 since 1992, when the drug was a relative newcomer to Israel.

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The Tel Aviv District Court yesterday charged Zayid Aljarushi and Rami Wahidi with running one of the major drug dealing stations in Lod.

The court remanded the two for two weeks until the next hearing.

Aljarushi is considered one of the major dealers in the area who police had been trying to build a case against for a long time, according to police sources.

According to the charge sheet, Aljarushi supplied drugs to Hamad Alhadi and Suleiman S'naa, the men who operated the so-called "kaspomat" (automatic teller machine) where customers could buy drugs through a window just like bank customers could get cash from an ATM.

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Is There A Fundamental Difference - Morally, And In Terms Of The Harm They Cause - Between Illegal Drugs And Legal Ones, Such As Alcohol, Nicotine And Prozac? The Question Is Being Seriously Debated In The United States.

A biting article in the latest issue of the prestigious American Harper's magazine asked its readers to note "How the war on drugs strangles your Bill of Rights." The article, part of an ongoing debate in recent years in U.S. publications, questions accepted concepts on drugs, pointing to several absurd aspects in the distinction between legal and illegal substances. "The 'war on drugs' began as a rhetorical flourish used by Richard Nixon to contrast his tough stand on crime with LBJ's 'war on poverty,'" write Harper's Graham Boyd and Jack Hitt. "But as the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations poured billions of dollars into fighting drugs, the slogan slipped the reins of metaphor to become just a plain old war - with an army (DEA), an enemy (profiled minorities, the poor, the cities), a budget ($17.8 billion), and a shibboleth (the children)." This is a blind war, argue the writers, and like all wars has no real victors - other than war industrialists.

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Police seized more than a million Ecstasy pills and arrested 49 people in the Netherlands, Israel and other countries in a sweep carried out by hundreds of officers, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.

The police estimate that the drug ring manufactured and distributed tens of tons of narcotics, supplying the drugs to Western Europe, Israel and the United States.

There were 25 arrests in Holland, eight in Israel and the remaining 16 in other countries.

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JERUSALEM - Uri Falcha was strolling down Venice Beach in Southern California one day three years ago. And he hit upon an idea. Falcha saw street vendors peddling organically grown weeds that looked like marijuana, that smelled like marijuana and, supposedly, that gave the high of marijuana, but without the cannabis.

His first attempt at bringing some of the stuff home to Israel landed him in jail at the Tel Aviv airport.

Today, after doing battle with the legal establishment, Falcha is peddling his own version of a smokable weed called Buzz.

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If you're flying in from South America or other regions where narcotics are produced and the passenger in the next seat suddenly acts strangely, he or she may be a "cocaine mule."

Doctors at the Institute for Forensic Medicine and Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine report on two cases of such drug messengers whose ingested packages of drugs exploded during their flight.

Acute cocaine overdose is due to the sudden, massive release of the drug into the digestive system. It can cause psychosis, convulsions and eventually death.

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JERUSALEM -- The nightmare began with a simple occurrence over the summer -- a telephone ringing in Ronen's home on the northern coast. A Foreign Ministry official was on the line.

"It was like the world fell on my head," Ronen said. "He told me: `Your daughter is in prison in Japan for importation of drugs.'"

"I said, `It's not true, someone stole her passport.'"

But the news was real.

His 24-year-old daughter, Dorit, had been stopped at Tokyo airport for allegedly bringing 11 pounds of hashish from India hidden inside picture frames.

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On Jan 20, the Israeli Health Ministry established a committee to provide doctors with guidelines for prescribing marijuana. Until now marijuana may only be given by special permit with the drug being provided by the police from confiscated supplies.

Boaz Lev, an internist and the ministry's deputy director-general for medical affairs, has asked the six-member committee of physicians, jurists, and public officials to define the medical conditions under which physicians will be permitted to prescribe marijuana, rather than continue on an ad hoc basis. "We want to establish the general guidelines and the optimum mechanism to provide marijuana to those who need it, but also to supervise distribution so the drug is not abused for non-medicinal use."

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MIAMI (AP) -- Three Israeli citizens hopped an El Al flight to Jerusalem over the holidays, skipping out on a $44 million money-laundering trial Monday that promised to link the Israeli mob to a Colombian cocaine cartel.

With just one defendant left and a busy trial calendar, U.S. District Judge Lenore Nesbitt postponed the trial until June 8.

But since Israeli law bars extradition of that country's citizens, the future of the Miami money-laundering case remained uncertain.

The stalled extradition from Israel -- in an unrelated case -- of a Maryland murder suspect also fed concerns over the ability of U.S. prosecutors to bring back the Miami case suspects: an Israeli couple and a man with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship.

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TEL AVIV A newly formed citizens' committee has mounted a campaign for a 50th anniversary amnesty to be granted to inmates sentenced for drug and debtrelated offenses, spokesmen said yesterday.

The Citizens' Committee for Amnesty will not seek pardons for anyone convicted of major felonies such as murder or rape, a news conference was told.

"We are not political and our efforts cut across racial and ethnic lines," former MK Charlie Biton said. "But it cannot be denied that the vast majority of prisoners in Israeli jails belong to the Sephardic population."

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