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.