The six-year-old girl thought it looked like plain sugar.

She reached into another girl’s backpack at Hardy Williams Elementary School near Philadelphia — and found a baggie of what seemed to be candy.

“She put the actual bag in her mouth and was chewing it,” Philadelphia Police Lt. John Walker told WPVI. “Fortunately, she didn’t break the actual seal.”

The two girls involved were rushed to the nurse’s office while the police and DHS were called. The girls, fortunately, were not believed to have ingested any of the drugs and were found to be in good health at the time.

It could have turned out much differently.

After the close call, the school released a statement to alarmed parents:

Around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, May 16, a staff member at Mastery Charter Schools Hardy Williams Elementary saw a kindergarten student trying to open a plastic bag with a white powder inside. Upon further inspection, the staff member determined the substance could possibly be drugs, confiscated the bag and immediately took the student to the nurse’s office. As a standard policy in these cases, the school contacted the police and DHS to investigate.

The child indicated she got the “candy” out of a classmate’s book bag. That child denied having any “candy,” but was also taken to the nurse’s office, where it was determined there was no evidence either of the students had ingested the substance.

As a precaution, we checked the belongings of all 25 students in the class. Nothing else was found.

We reached out to the families of both students involved and notified all parents about the incident this afternoon.

The police do not believe the crack cocaine came from the home of the young student involved, according to WTXF. “They are packaged to be individual like that, but usually they are in a larger grouping, so we don’t know if in fact there were other glassine bags out there in the school at this time,” said Police Lt. Walker.

A grandparent at the school, however, had serious questions about the crack cocaine.

“How does that even get in her bookbag?” Anthony Richardson told ABC 6. “Police will have a thorough investigation … [We hope] everything is good.”

Every year, thousands of children become the hardest-hit victims of a drug usage epidemic that has swept across the United States. The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that 66,324 people died from drug overdoses in the year leading up to March 2017.

Not only are hard “street drugs” like crack cocaine among the killers, but synthetic opioids like fetanyl and methadone are also part of the problem.

Who do you think would win the Presidency?

By completing the poll, you agree to receive emails from LifeZette, occasional offers from our partners and that you've read and agree to our privacy policy and legal statement.

Not only are hard “street drugs” like crack cocaine among the killers, but synthetic opioids like fetanyl and methadone are also part of the problem (the latter is used as treatment for opioid drug withdrawal).

A study by the journal Pediatrics, published in March 2018, examined the cases of patients between ages one and 17 who were admitted to hospitals for suspected opioid overdose treatment. The study found that the number of cases nearly doubled to 1,504 patients from 2012 to 2015, compared to the previous three-year span.

Related: Fentanyl Robs a 10-Year-Old of the Rest of His Life

“The thing that was a bit striking is that in the youngest children, those under six years of age, 20 percent of the ingestions were of methadone. So you sort of have to ask yourself: Where are they getting all this methadone from?” Dr. Jason Kane told CNN.

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon or any other kind of doctor to figure out most of these kids are getting the drugs from their parents.

The human cost of these dangerous drugs is a harsh lesson no schoolchild should have to learn.

Sadly, as with the case of the six-year-old who found “candy” in a backpack that turned out to be crack cocaine, the human cost of these dangerous drugs is a harsh lesson no schoolchild should have to learn.

Kyle Becker is a content writer and producer with LifeZette. Follow him on Twitter

(photo credit, homepage image: Delaware State Police)