News this week that Minot will receive a $180,000 state grant to strengthen its efforts to treat opioid use disorders and improve community education is great news for Minot and for the Mayor’s Committee on Addiction, which has been meeting to look at holistic ways to address the threat.

Still better news is that it seems unlikely the grant will get absorbed into one or more administrative bureaucracy. Eighty percent of the grant money must go to treatment initiatives; 20 percent to education.

Hopefully, this will just be the start of taking a comprehensive look at the opioid problem and finding ways to address it in our community on all fronts.

That said, money is not the solution to the problem. If money alone could solve problems, the U.S. would have the best performing schools in the world, there would be no drug crisis and no poverty. Perhaps you notice that we aren’t trending in positive directions on any of those fronts.

Funding must be accompanied by a realistic strategy that is means-tested with a history of results. In this case, it means the public sector must look to nonprofit and private sector institutions with records of successfully providing treatment. We must also look at those places – here or elsewhere in the world – where education has been successful at staving off the early hooks of addiction. We must look at the role that physicians and medical facilities play in the problem.

Finally, we must approach the problem as a community and a society. How many more times are we going to hear national stories about teens who die of an addiction that the youth’s parents didn’t even know existed? How many times are we going to tolerate a friend or family member shrugging off the death of a neighbor because it as drug related?

Some of the change needed is in our hearts and minds. No amount of money can make that happen.

However, at least Minot is on the road to some of the resources needed to move in the right direction.