We call ourselves a headshop without thinking much about it. It's one of those trade terms that's been around long enough to stop sounding like anything in particular. But it's a genuinely odd phrase when you stop and look at it, and the story behind it is better than you'd expect.
The short version
"Head" was 1960s American slang for someone who used drugs, particularly psychedelics and cannabis. A pothead, an acidhead, or just a head. A shop that served those people became a head shop.
That's the accepted explanation, and it's almost certainly right. What's less well known is that nobody can prove it, and there are at least three competing accounts of exactly how the phrase stuck.
Where the first ones appeared
Head shops emerged in mid-1960s America, in cities with large student populations, and often grew out of existing poster shops, candle shops and record stores rather than being founded as anything new.
The one usually credited as the first is the Psychedelic Shop, opened on Haight Street in San Francisco on 3 January 1966 by brothers Ron and Jay Thelin. Ron was a US Army veteran. The pair had been inspired after seeing a lecture by Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary's Harvard colleague, and opened a store aimed squarely at the counterculture gathering in Haight-Ashbury. It sold clothing and jewellery, incense, records, posters, books, magazines and paraphernalia, and it very quickly became a hub rather than just a shop.
Four months later, Jeff Glick opened a store on East Ninth Street in New York City called, simply, Head Shop. Also in 1966, the Birmingham Balloon Company opened on Fry Street in Denton, Texas. Within a few years the model had spread across St Mark's Place in New York's East Village, West Los Angeles and Chicago's Old Town.
The three theories
The slang theory. The most widely accepted. "Head" as a suffix for a devoted user was already in circulation, and it never really went away. Deadheads followed the Grateful Dead. Acidheads took LSD. Potheads smoked. A shop for heads was a head shop. Simple, and it fits the timeline.
The shop name theory. Some historians argue the term came from Glick's New York store specifically, that he named it Head Shop and everyone else adopted the label from the sign. Why Glick chose the name isn't recorded. It may itself have been a nod to the slang, in which case the two theories collapse into one.
The mind theory. The looser suggestion is that "head" pointed at what these places were actually selling, which was less the pipe than the experience. The Thelins weren't running a paraphernalia business in any modern sense; they saw psychedelics as a response to the Vietnam War and the culture around it, and the shop as a place to spread that idea. Under this reading a head shop was a shop for your head.
The honest answer is that the origin isn't documented, which is unusual for a term that spread this fast. Most reference sources say plainly that it remains unclear.
What they actually were
It's worth resisting the tidy modern picture of a headshop as a retail category. In their first decade these places did something closer to what a community centre does.
Between roughly 1968 and 1975, head shops were one of the main distribution routes for underground newspapers and for underground comix, including Robert Crumb's work, which had almost no access to conventional newsstand distribution. They were tied into the anti-war movement and into early cannabis reform groups like LeMar, Amorphia and NORML. The stock reflected that: alongside pipes and papers there were protest badges, zines, incense, tie-dye and psychedelic posters.
The paraphernalia was, in a sense, the least interesting part of the shop.
The crackdown
What followed is the part most people don't know. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, US states began passing anti-paraphernalia legislation, and the federal Mail Order Drug Paraphernalia Control Act arrived in 1986. Thousands of shops closed. The ones that survived did so by changing what they said rather than what they sold, which is where the "for tobacco use only" convention originated, and why saying the wrong thing in a headshop can still get you asked to leave in parts of the United States.
The British trajectory was different. UK headshops arrived later and were shaped less by paraphernalia law than by the wave of novel psychoactive substances in the 2000s, and then by the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which removed that trade almost overnight. What was left was much closer to what the shops had been in the first place.
What the word means now
The term has stretched a long way from 1966. A modern headshop is as likely to be selling German-engineered dry herb vaporisers, quartz bangers and precision scales as it is posters and incense. The countercultural signalling has largely gone, and Google doesn't even have a category for us, the closest official listing is "vaporiser shop".
Some of it survives, though. The glass is still made by named artists rather than factories. The staff still generally use what they sell. And the shops are still, in most towns, one of the few places where you can ask an awkward question and get a straight answer rather than a policy statement.
Not a bad legacy for a phrase nobody can properly source.
Frequently asked questions
What was the first head shop?
The Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street, San Francisco, opened by Ron and Jay Thelin on 3 January 1966. Jeff Glick's Head Shop opened in New York four months later.
Why is it called a head shop?
Almost certainly from 1960s slang, where a "head" meant a drug user, as in pothead or acidhead. The exact route the term took isn't documented.
Is head shop or headshop correct?
Both are in use. The two-word version is older; the closed-up form has become more common in Britain and Ireland.
What's the difference between a head shop and a smoke shop?
Largely regional. "Smoke shop" is more common in the United States and often implies tobacco and cigars alongside glass. "Head shop" carries the counterculture history with it.
Are head shops legal in the UK?
Yes. Selling smoking accessories, vaporisers and related products to over-18s is entirely legal here. The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 ended the trade in novel psychoactive substances that some UK shops had relied on, but it didn't affect accessories.
We've been doing this a while, across Belfast, Larne and Ballymena. Have a look at our bongs, pipes and vaporisers, or read our guide to picking out a new pipe if you're just getting started.
18+ only. All products sold for legal use in accordance with UK and Irish law.