Marlena Olivas was already missing one child. The young mother says two of her children were taken away from her by county authorities in January because they did not believe she had adequate housing. (County officials refused to talk about the case, citing privacy laws.)

The elder of the two children, 2-year-old Everlyse, was placed in foster care in the home of Manuel and Vilma Carrascal in North Las Vegas. Everlyse has been missing since June 10. The Carrascals initially told police that the missing girl stood on a stool, unlocked the front door and walked away from the house. But North Las Vegas police say the Carrascals are no longer cooperating with their investigation into the toddler's disappearance.

Marlena Olivas is still being kept apart from her 1-year-old. In fact, she says, she first came into contact with county child welfare officials when that son was born. Both she and the child tested positive for marijuana at the time, she says.

Both parents -- Ms. Olivas and her husband, Ernest Cabrera -- were ordered to take a drug treatment class. (Again, county officials would not say whether that was ordered by a judge, or merely by non-elected bureaucrats as a condition of getting back any remaining children the county has thus far managed not to lose.)

Ms. Olivas admits she didn't complete the classes. But she says she wasn't warned that as a result, county officials would do what they did on July 6.

Marlena Olivas gave birth to a new baby at University Medical Center on July 5. Born three weeks premature, the infant weighed 5 pounds, 11 ounces, and was drug free. "I'm clean and sober," the mother says. "The baby is clean. They (the hospital staff) let me know that me and the baby are totally healthy."

Yet when Marlena Olivas went to leave the hospital with her baby the next day, authorities took the newborn out of her arms.

"This is my newborn they have taken," Olivas said on Friday. "They lost my daughter and now they are telling me it's justified to take my baby?"

Actually, it's not. When "drug classes" are assigned as a condition of probation or a suspended sentence, a judge can of course reimpose the initial sentence for a failure to complete such a program. But such court proceedings feature due process and a presumption of innocence; a jail sentence for being a first-time marijuana user and bearing a child would be unusual, to say the least.

"Seizing your children" as punishment for almost any crime, short of violent and life-threatening child abuse, verges on a textbook illustration of "cruel and unusual punishment" -- all the more so, because it punishes the innocent child by depriving him of the most concerned and nurturing caretaker available.

Pot ingested in the womb or through mother's milk may indeed be bad for infants -- but so are alcohol, nicotine and caffeine. If the Legislature really meant to make "having all your children taken away" a statutory punishment for the crime of pot smoking -- or for the crime of being poor and having "inadequate housing" -- we'd like to see the law. As would, we hope, the Supreme Court.

And if you think seizing poor newborns who test positive for alcohol or nicotine won't soon follow -- just wait.

Statistics show children are far more likely to die, be injured or suffer abuse in foster care than when left with their birth parents -- even in such extreme cases as the children of crack cocaine users -- according to Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and UNLV law professor Annette Appell, who contributed the commentary, "No substitute for home: Too many Nevada kids taken from parents," in the July 9 Review-Journal. They reported that Nevada seizes children at twice the national average.

Children do not belong to the state. Mothers with drug problems should be offered help designed to make it easier to keep and care for their children.

Or do we really want to drive women in labor away from appropriate medical care for fear of having their babies seized?