Marian Fischman

Marian Rita Weinbaum Fischman (October 13, 1939 – October 23, 2001) was an American psychologist.

She researched narcotics and addiction.

Born Marian Rita Weinbaum in Queens, New York, Fischman lived her early years in an apartment above her father's drugstore.

She attended Barnard College before completing a master's in psychology at Columbia University and a doctorate from University of Chicago.

Her thesis addressed the effects of methamphetamine on Rhesus monkeys and "found persisting effects on decreased dopamine and serotonin in the Rhesus monkey brain, suggesting long-term damage."

In 1984, she began research on cocaine and other drugs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and began to examine, in physiology, how healthy, nonincarcerated human cocaine users become psychologically tolerant to larger and larger doses.

To do so, she set up a residential laboratory where users could live free for up to four weeks at a time while studies continued.

According to her obituary,"The addicts she recruited for her experiments were given drugs, food, hospital rooms with sound and video equipment, and pay. She also made an open offer to help any addict get treatment, but none of her subjects accepted."Fischman met her second husband, Herbert Kleber, at a scientific meeting in Washington D.C. in 1987.

Together they founded a research center in drug addiction at Columbia University in 1992 and Fischman was appointed a professor with tenure at Columbia.

According to Kleber, Fischman was "the first research scientist since Freud to use controlled scientific experiments with humans to directly examine cocaine's effects."

As co-director of one of the center's divisions, she managed five laboratories where studies were conducted to measure how patients changed physiologically and behaviorally when they were under the influence of drugs.

Her models went on to become an established basis for studying potential medications to treat drug abuse.

She also expanded from her concentration on studying addiction and also tested drugs that were being designed to combat the effects of cocaine and heroin.

Marian Fischman, who first married physician Donald Fischman, died at 62 on October 23, 2001, at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital from complications with colon cancer.

She was survived by Kleber and a son, two daughters, two stepdaughters, mother, and a brother.

She was residing in Manhattan at the time of her death.

According to WorldCat.org, Fischman is listed as author or co-author of 23 works in 31 publications.