Pubdate: Sun, 11 Nov 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: Obituaries
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Douglas Martin

DR. MARIAN FISCHMAN, DIES AT 62; STUDIED THE EFFECTS OF COCAINE

Marian Fischman, a scientist who explored narcotics addiction by paying 
addicts to take heroin, cocaine and other drugs, died on Oct. 23 at New 
York Presbyterian Hospital. She was 62 and lived in Manhattan.

Her husband, Dr. Herbert Kleber, said she died of complications of colon 
cancer.

Dr. Kleber, a psychiatrist who is the director of the Division on Substance 
Abuse at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 
said his wife was the first research scientist since Freud to use 
controlled scientific experiments with humans to directly examine cocaine's 
effects. Past experiments were limited to animals.

His wife, who as co-director of the division directed five separate 
laboratories, studied how people changed physiologically and behaviorally 
when under the influence of drugs. The models she established became a 
basis for studying potential medications to treat drug abuse.

Among other things, she tested drugs that appeared to thwart the effects of 
heroin and cocaine, and devised ways to study what were believed to be the 
greatly disparate effects of snorting cocaine versus smoking it in the form 
of crack. In 1996, this led her to publicly advocate more equitable prison 
sentences for possessing either form of cocaine. Despite the efforts of Dr. 
Fischman and others, possessing five grams of crack is still punishable by 
the same five-year sentence as possessing 500 grams of powdered cocaine.

"The important issue is when possible to try to have science inform public 
policy," she said. "Cocaine is cocaine. Regardless of whether you shoot it 
up or smoke it or snort it, it has the same effect."

Addicts recruited to participate in her experiments received free drugs, 
meals, a comfortable hospital room with a VCR and a stereo, and a paycheck. 
"This is a fine time in America to be a drug addict," the New York Post 
columnist Andrea Peyser wrote about the program in 1999.

Dr. Fischman's answer was that she continually offered to help participants 
get into treatment programs, even if their departure would harm her 
experiments. Nobody ever took the offer, however.

Marian Rita Weinbaum was born in Queens on Oct. 13, 1939, and grew up in an 
apartment above her father's drugstore. She graduated from Barnard College, 
earned a master's degree in psychology from Columbia and went to the 
University of Chicago to pursue her doctorate. She began studying how the 
brain learns, and wrote her thesis on the effects of methamphetamine on 
rhesus monkeys.

Dr. Fischman shifted her research focus to humans and from methamphetamine 
to cocaine. She began to examine, in physiology, how cocaine users become 
psychologically tolerant to larger and larger doses.

In 1984, she moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she 
continued her cocaine work, setting up a residential laboratory where users 
could live for up to four weeks at a time.

She also studied other drugs, and proved that weekend users of alcohol were 
less effective on Monday mornings, and that marijuana smokers indeed 
developed appetites for snacks. She adapted her methods to study legal 
drugs for drug companies, but lost interest even though that attracted 
considerable financial support.

"Her interest was not in repeating the same thing," said Dr. Kleber, who 
met his wife at a scientific meeting in Washington in 1987. Dr. Kleber 
served as deputy drug czar in the first Bush administration, and was a 
leader of Yale's drug research program.

The two moved to New York in 1992 to head Columbia's new substance abuse 
program, which was created for them. "A lot of what we know about how 
cocaine affects humans is the result of her work," said David M. McDowell, 
a Columbia University scientist who is one of many young researchers she 
mentored.

Dr. McDowell called Dr. Fischman "the exact opposite" of what one would 
expect from a researcher, recalling her love of walking, baking and 
single-malt Scotch. "There was an elegance about her," he said.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a son, Eric Fischman of 
Boston; two daughters, Sharon Fischman of Bethesda, Md., and Amanda 
Fischman Henshon of Boston; a stepson, Marc Kleber of Manhattan; two 
stepdaughters, Elizabeth Kleber of Philadelphia and Pamela Shad of 
Greenwich, N.Y.; her mother, Sarah Weinbaum of Philadelphia; a brother, 
George Weinbaum of Philadelphia; four grandchildren; and four 
step-grandchildren.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth