the baby tapering off the Clonidine — "The father of Ruth van Cleve’s…"
The father of Ruth van Cleve’s child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.
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.