Brady Flanigan
Editor
The “interview room” in the Tullahoma News office is a claustrophobic white cubicle, boarded-in from all sides. There’s a long lacquered table and tall villanish corporate chairs. Back in the day, it was probably used for editorial meetings or heavy conversations, but nowadays it’s a throwaway—used when people are invited to tell their most personal and destructive stories or their most frivolous whatevers. Alan Vickers had traveled from his home in Manchester, Tenn. through the blue morning breeze, perhaps with the windows down and the summer rushing in, to sit down in that cinderblock chamber and tell a tough tale about his new life’s work, his nonprofit Chase Away Fentanyl.
”I was headed home,” he said leaning back in his chair at the head of the table, “and I lost my vision and I was like, ‘come on,’ he said frustrated, “of course I was crying and upset, you know, but I lost my vision.”
This was Jan. 16, 2024—the day Alan’s son Chase died of a fentanyl overdose, and the day Chase Away Fentanyl was born. In the morning Alan’s grandson Cash, eight-years-old then, came into the living room to ask Pawpaw why dad was asleep on the floor. By the time he rushed into the bedroom, he was already dead from a fentanyl overdose.
“It kind of looked like gold spray paint in front of my face. It was just a split second, but then it backed away and it said ‘Chase Away Fentanyl’—just like the Hollywood sign, just driving down the road. I mean, like I said, it was just a split second, but that honestly happened. That’s where it all came. That’s where it all started. And so when I got home, I told my wife. Well, I, I mean, it was probably a few hours before I even told her, ’cause I had to process it myself.”
When Cash asked what was going on with dad, the bad omens crept up Alan’s stomach like an invasive vine. Chase had struggled with addiction since he was a teenager. Before that fateful day, he’d been clean for almost a year.
”I took him to treatment the first time when he was 14 years old.”
He doesn’t blame himself, but he thinks, paradoxically, that it was that first stint in rehab that sent Chase down a decades long struggle with opioids. Alan is in recovery himself—24 years sober, a former methamphetamine user. When he caught Chase with cannabis at 14, he saw thunderheads on the horizon. He wanted the course corrected early.
“It was kind of to be a wake up call, and I don’t,” he struggled to speak, “that was counterproductive. I think maybe, uh, I don’t, I, I mean, I don’t blame myself for any of his issues at all, but, um. You know, I, that might not have been the wisest decision. But I’m kind of hardcore, you know? And, uh, old school. And, and so I thought, well, I’ll teach him, you know, and I’ll take him.”
Throughout his life, Chase went through nine rounds of treatment before he died. It was one pill, pressed to appear like prescription Percocet, filled with fentanyl, that ended it.
Fentanyl. It’s a mainstay of modern healthcare. Like morphine, fentanyl is an opioid. Its primary use is pain management. Whereas morphine exists in nature, secreted from the ooze of the poppy plant, fentanyl is synthetic. It’s manufactured in a lab. Morphine is active in the lower-end of the milligram range. Fentanyl is active in the lower end of the microgram range. That makes it 50-100 times more potent than morphine. Few drugs in any category carry that level of spice. Botulinum toxin, a potentially deadly neurotoxin that causes muscle paralysis and, the key ingredient in Botox; ricin, a deadly toxin with no proven antidote produced in castor beans, a popular poison throughout history; and LSD, the psychedelic voice of a generation, centerpiece of CIA mind control experiments in the 1950s. If it’s active by the microgram, it’s usually got some bite.
Fentanyl is invaluable to hospitals because of its potency. A little goes a long way. And it’s favored because it’s especially lipophilic. It absorbs quickly into our fat, which makes it rapid onset.
Behind Alan, the door of the interview room remained cracked—to let some claustrophobia out. As he spoke, the sound of a squealing child came barreling down the hallway. The child’s pitch changed as he scuttled by, like a passing fire engine.
”He just broke off a little side of it, which made me believe that maybe he did know it was fentanyl,” he said.
In that moment, there was a surprising amount of resolve in the voice of a man who found his son dead on the floor only a year prior. But that’s his mission speaking. Once he saw the image of a sign reading “Chase Away Fentanyl” appear like a “Welcome to Las Vegas” billboard glowing in the night as he drove home from the hospital, his life has been about preventing anyone from going through what he did, no matter how much it hurts him. If he has to bleed this story from his arm to keep others from experiencing it, he’s willing to do it. It’s his legacy now, and it’s Chase’s.
“He was a heroin addict,” Alan said, “so I, I, you know, I don’t know. It was a hundred percent fentanyl. It was pure fentanyl. A hundred percent fentanyl pill that big could probably have killed a thousand people.”
For a year now Alan has been spending his time giving away Narcan and speaking about the opioid crisis in the south. Per capita, more Tennesseans die from opioid overdoses than 47 other states. His passion for saving lives was infectious enough that by December of 2024, Chase Away Fentanyl had already distributed $177,000 worth of Narcan.
Before the end of the year, Alan has plans to set up shop in Bedford County, probably somewhere along Madison Street. He’s got a tent now and a custom wrap on his truck—bright orange graphics, donated by 580 Signs. It’s the kind of thing designed to get stared at in parking lots. He’ll hand out Narcan, talk to those who’ll listen, and listen to anyone who wants to be heard. He said his plan is pretty simple.
“Make a footprint first, then keep showing up.”
The grunt work for Chase Away Fentanyl takes him farther from home than it used to. The weekend after talking to Alan, he was traveling to speak at Healing Appalachia, an enormous recovery festival held on the West Virginia-Kentucky line, in the foothills of the mountains. By the time Alan arrived, the event had sold 28,000 tickets.
The new executive director, Logan, happens to be a buddy. He writes grants for Alan’s nonprofit when he isn’t running the festival.
“He called me up one day and said, ‘You wanna come talk?’” Alan laughed. “I said, ‘Well yeah, I reckon I can do that.’”
He’ll speak on a panel called “Grandfamilies,” about raising grandchildren orphaned by addiction. His grandson Cash—now nine—lives with him full-time. It’s not a topic he’s touched much in public, but he knows it’ll hit harder that way.
“I have to be vulnerable in order to reach folks,” he said. “And I’m okay with that.”
Alan knows what he wants to change.
He believes anyone convicted of distributing fentanyl, or other synthetic opioids should face an attempted murder charge for every two milligrams they possess—two milligrams being enough to kill most people.
“We can’t prosecute our way out of addiction,” he said, “but we can put the fear of God in people who are making a living selling poison.”
He’d also like to see those drugs legally reclassified as poisons rather than narcotics.
“If you feed someone rat poison, that’s first-degree murder,” he said. “You give ‘em fentanyl, you might get ten years. How’s that make sense?”
By the same token, he understands the gap between prevention and punishment. Alan’s war is rooted in empathy, not anger. He’s been in recovery for a quarter-century himself, long enough to remember what it feels like to be treated as “just a junkie.” That kind of treatment, he says, is what kills people.
“They’re somebody’s kid, somebody’s daddy, somebody’s mama,” he said. “They deserve to live just as much as I do. I’m not special. I’m just another guy trying to make it one more day—and help somebody else do the same.”
When the interview ended, we shook hands and marched back into the sunshine. Outside, his car sat in the parking lot, regular and unwrapped. The orange Chase Away Fentanyl truck was parked miles away in Manchester. Soon enough, he’d be back at the wheel, crossing state lines, setting up a tent and table, passing out pamphlets and Narcan, chasing the same gold light he saw on the day he lost Chase.