An Ohio pub issued a public apology after parodying Cap’n Crunch with a joke menu item called “Oops! All Fentanyl.”
Some jokes are best untold, as one restaurant and pub in Lakewood, Ohio is learning after a bungled social media post. On their Instagram account, the restaurant Yuzu posted a photo of a bag of fentanyl labeled “Oops! All Fentanyl” and “New brunch special? Sat & Sun.”
The “joke” was likely referring to how many opioid drugs being sold have been unexpectedly cut with fentanyl, which has led to accidental fatal overdoses. Many Instagram users who saw it were not amused.
“Screenshot from Yuzu Lakewood’s IG story. Not at all cool,” one person responded. “Making a joke of the opioid crisis is never funny ever.”
The establishment’s owner, Dave Bumba, seemed to ignore the controversy his social media account created for about three days before finally responding on Facebook.
“First, it’s never our intention to cause any malicious offense, and for that I do genuinely apologize for,” Bumba wrote in the post. “There’s a generational gap of humor; our target demo is 21 to 34. I’m aged out of our demo myself. Younger generations have developed a different sense of humor that more abstract, surreal, and darker than previous generations.”
Bumba stopped short of calling the backlash a result of political correctness, instead turning into a meta-analysis of what’s a relatable coping mechanism versus what’s actually offensive.
“It would be easy for me to blame this simply on an overly-politically-correct culture. A loud subset of people have been trained to seek out a reason to be offended. And while this might exist on some level, seeing some of the constructive criticism also made me think retrospectively about our social media content choices,” he posted. “Just because something exists and is perceived to be liked by enough of a subset of our demographic, does that make it the socially right choice to be relatable content?”
Users considered the statement a non-apology, calling Bumba out on using a generational gap as cover.
“Rather than sincerely apologizing for your offensive posts (which personally are not clever or funny and were in very poor taste), you backpeddle and still try to place blame on those you offended by implying they aren’t young or hip enough to get the joke,” wrote a user.
Fentanyl has accelerated the number of deaths in the opioid crisis, hitting areas like Arizona especially hard. There, deaths from fentanyl overdoses have tripled between 2015 and 2017, mostly due to users believing they had a weaker opioid, like oxycodone, in hand.
Street fentanyl is often disguised as legitimate prescription opioids, but these bootlegged pills are often made in primitive conditions with no quality control. And it only takes a little bit of fentanyl to send users into overdose.
Users, including those of the targeted millennial demographic, have commented explaining why the joke wasn’t funny. Yuzu hasn’t posted anything further.
