Marie Nyswander (March 13, 1919 – April 20, 1986) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst[1] known for developing and popularizing the use of methadone to treat heroin addiction.
At Lexington, addicts were treated harshly:[3][6] for instance, women at the facility were confined to their building except for a once-a-week movie.
During this period she was married to her second husband, Leonard Wallace Robinson, a writer and editor; they became engaged in 1953, divorced in 1965, and had no children.
Dole and Nyswander began their research by observing the effects of different narcotics on addicts, and discovered that morphine and methadone led to quite different behaviors.
The most heavily cited of these[20] are: Nyswander was the co-recipient with her spouse Vincent Dole of the first annual award of the National Drug Abuse Conference in 1978.
[27] In 2000, a special issue of the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine concerning methadone treatment was dedicated to Nyswander's memory.