When a kindergartner arrived at a school in the United States with eighty-nine grams of marijuana in a backpack, the incident prompted the predictable cycle of alarmed headlines and dark jokes — but also a more serious set of questions about how children end up in these situations and what schools and authorities are supposed to do about it.

The child, by definition, had no awareness of what was in the bag. Five-year-olds do not conceptually understand what marijuana is, have no purchasing power, and are entirely dependent on the adults in their lives for what they bring to school. When a kindergartner shows up with nearly a hundred grams of a controlled substance, the reasonable inference is that an adult in the household left it somewhere accessible, or — in grimmer scenarios — placed it there.

School officials are required by policy and in many cases by law to report such incidents to law enforcement, and the child welfare implications of a situation where a young child has unsupervised access to significant quantities of illegal drugs typically trigger investigation by child protective services.

The cases that generate media coverage tend to be treated, partly for comedic value, as absurd outliers. In reality, they are windows into family situations in which children are growing up in environments where the normal protections that adults are supposed to provide are inadequate or absent.

The child in such a situation is not a story about marijuana. The child is a story about vulnerability — about what it means to be five years old and entirely dependent on adults who are, in this moment, failing at the basic job of keeping you safe and separate from things that have no place in a kindergartner's backpack.

The appropriate response is child-centered, not punitive toward a five-year-old.