America's Oldest Head Shop

  Captain Ed’s Shoppe, in Van Nuys and Reseda, CA, first opened its doors in 1967. The shop has managed to survive 10 American Presidents (!), though not without some fast thinking. In Fact, it was in 1980, during the Reagan Administration, that the shop was forced to change its name from Heads & Highs, which the Feds suggested implied drug use. Edwin Marsh Adair III, a.k.a. Captain Ed, was an aspiring actor turned pot activist. He didn’t like being told what to do, but he found a happy solution: He named the place after himself. Co-owner Bob Silverman didn’t mind, and the rest is history. The shop has barely changed since the days of Hendrix and Abbie Hoffman. The walls are covered in out of print posters, stapled up by 50-plus years of hippie hands, and the wooden floors are stained deep with decades of stoner tracks. A cloud of incense hangs over the display cases jammed with colorful glass pipes, high tech vaporizers, and every other product that could be desired by hedonists young and old. Hundreds of signatures have been collected over the years for legalization and other worthy causes.