the baby tapering off the Clonidine
The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about.
Context
The inherited disease at its most literal: a newborn in an incubator being weaned off Clonidine for the addictions it contracted in the womb, born already dependent, the transmission complete before the first breath. And the family it's born into — mother remanded to a halfway house, father jailed for "operating a pharmaceutical company without a license" (the euphemism doing its grim comic work) — is the substance-economy in full, a child handed the disease and the wrecked system that produced it in one delivery.