M. Nyswander, Methadone Pioneer, Dies

Marie Nyswander, a psychiatrist who helped determine that regular doses of methadone could free heroin addicts of their debilitating habit, died of cancer Sunday. She was 67.

Dr. Nyswander, a senior research associate at the Rockefeller University where her original research was conducted, died at her home in New York City, the university said.

Dr. Nyswander and her husband, Vincent Dole, also of the Rockefeller University, were the co-developers of methadone maintenance for the management of heroin addiction. Since that time, an estimated 150,000 heroin users have entered methadone maintenance programs. About 100,000 are believed currently involved.

Their research was an outgrowth of her experiences at a storefront Harlem clinic where Dr. Nyswander was working for the Public Health Service. Her work with addicts had first begun at the federal hospital in Lexington, Ky., in 1945, making her a pioneer in that field.

Her husband--working with addict volunteers supplied by his wife--began administering methadone to them in 1964. The opiate synthetic had first been used in Germany in World War II in place of morphine.

The treatment remains controversial, many scientists believing that it merely replaces one addictive drug with another.

Her work in Harlem was profiled in a two-part piece in the New Yorker magazine in 1965, and later published as a book, “A Doctor Among the Addicts,” by Nat Hentoff.

Dr. Nyswander had written her own book, “The Drug Addict as Patient,” in 1956 in which she advocated treating addicts as a medical rather than merely a societal problem.

Besides her husband she is survived by her mother and three stepchildren.