OK think of it like this, CPS’ duty is to the child. Their goal is to provide the best environment for the child they can. Absent other factors that will always be with the parents. If they see issues with how the child is being raised or their environment they don’t immediately take the child away (depending on the severity, obviously). They will provide the parent with education, supplies, etc to fix the problem and get the child back into a healthy environment.

Things can escalate from there if repeated attempts are not yielding positive results. In this case it said she had previous issues with smoking around her other children. That is unhealthy. I doubt that was the only factor in removing them but it is part of the history, so when they saw she had been smoking while pregnant they removed the child.

I would also like to point out from Googling it sounds like that is the procedure in NY, a child can be removed and then the parent can go to court to ask a judge to have the child returned. That is what happened. Then it sounds like the issue with CPS was them not returning the child in a timely manner and using marijuana use it self as a factor determining a child was in a bad environment. Those are obviously issues, but the initial removal (keep in mind we are both armchair quarterbacking) did not seem like an issue to me, it fit standard practices as I have known them.