Joycelyn Woods is a founding member and the President of the National Alliance of Methadone Advocates. While in college, Ms. Woods began using drugs. She became addicted to heroin in 1966, when she was forced to drop out of school for financial reasons. In 1971, she moved to New York City and enrolled in methadone treatment during its expansion in 1972. In 1976, she returned to college and completed undergraduate work in physiological psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY). She continued her graduate work in neuroscience at CUNY receiving a Master of Arts degree in 1984 from Hunter College. She published one of the early papers mapping opiate receptors and was the first to inject naltrexone in rat brains.In 1988, she left the laboratory to devote several years to intravenous drug research and the HIV epidemic. From 1988 until 1992, she worked for Narcotic and Drug Research, Inc., as a Project Director of the International Working Group on AIDS and IV Drug Use. During that period she became involved in methadone advocacy, and helped found NAMA.In 2001, she received the Richard Lane Methadone Advocacy Award. NAMA is the only national methadone patient advocacy organization. There are about 60 affiliated chapters and affiliates throughout the world forming a strong US and international advocacy network. In the US NAMA has developed a grievance process by which methadone patients may file a complaint or a compliment about their program or other service.

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