history | Denver's Best Smoke Shop

What’s In a Name? Cannabis vs. Marijuana

13 June 2020

The American cannabis industry is rapidly growing and evolving with every passing year. With the increased popularity and policy changes surrounding the plant, a number of controversies have also arisen. How much testing do we need before legalizing each form of cannabis? What should the legal age be? Is state-by-state legalization enough, or is Federal legalization an essential step?

Rolling Down The Road: The History of Tobacco and Rolling Papers

17 February 2020

Frequent visitors of head shops like 710 Pipes tend to appreciate our mainstays, such as pipes, hookah products and rolling papers. While the love of smoking products permeates popular culture, very few of us are versed in the origins of the staples we rely upon today. We’ve reached deep into the past this week, exploring the respective journeys of tobacco and rolling papers to the popular forms we know and love.

Hemp Architecture for the Ages

11 October 2019

Hemp: It’s Really Blowing Up These Days

Silk, engine fuel, cellophane and…dynamite! Surprisingly, all of these products can be derived from hemp, and arguably that’s just four examples of about 25,000 diverse commercial applications for the hemp plant. Frequenters of the blog (namely my mother) might be familiar with a 1936 article from Popular Mechanics that lauds the surprising prodigiousness of the hemp plant:

Ancient China’s Obsession with Hemp: the World’s First War Crop

30 September 2019

Hemp and humanity have cohabited for millennia. In fact, the earliest word for the plant comes to us from China, so far back in time that it predates written history. “Ma” is the oldest word for the hemp plant and, arguably, what infants have actually been attempting to demand from us all along.

Hemp: The World’s First Paper and the Trickster Who Got Everyone to Use It

20 September 2019

The history of China is vast and steeped in legends and mythology. It represents the continuation of a culture so immune to outside influence that it stretches back beyond history to a time before paper or written records of any sort. Today, we’ll skip back before the time of head shops, smoke shops, and vaporizers to look at the invention of paper itself – discovered in the midst of this impressive culture’s beginnings and destined to define the nation’s advancement for centuries to come.

Hemp’s Essential Role in the Royal British Navy

10 September 2019

The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire

For centuries, Great Britain dominated the planet with military superiority, building bases on every continent and joining those continents with international trade. Integral to this system was an advanced Navy, which boasted the cutting edge of technology in both design and structure.

Crime and Cannabis: Comparing Studies to Lingering Stigmas

31 August 2019

Throughout recent years surrounding cannabis legalization, a rather volatile (if quiet) debate has continued to echo down the halls of established mainstream media outlets. One question lies at the heart of the controversy – what social impact, if any, do cannabis dispensaries have on their surrounding communities? The United States and most other countries have had head shops, pipe shops and smoke shops for decades, many of which cater to the cannabis-friendly. For this reason, the concern seems almost strange. At last, the numbers are in to put this issue to rest – so put down that bong and take a look.

The Founding Fathers’ Love of Hemp

17 August 2019

We all know that the founding fathers were industrious and pragmatic men. Benjamin Franklin literally wrote the book on practicality – with his famous work “An American Life” still quoted to this day.

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

It should therefore come as no surprise that some of our nation’s most honored founders were enamored with a plant that was equally practical, industrious and versatile – hemp.

Incense Across the Globe

29 April 2019

What is Incense?

The word “incense” is derived from the Latin word “incendere,” meaning “to burn.” And for several millenniums of human history, we’ve done just that. “Incense” refers to a specific bound material which is burned to produce a number of rich fragrances, and not the fragrance itself. While our modern definition is rather narrow, many experts believe that other flavorful items like cedars, berries and roots have been burned throughout human history to produce the same effects. Like anything that’s withstood the test of time, the use of incense has evolved and improved over its many millenniums of history. Better yet, you can pick some up at 710Pipes’ Denver or Northglenn smoke shops and burn an homage to that rich history tonight. Below we’ll explore the most fascinating aspects of incense’s history and its uses across the globe.

Hard-Hitting History of the Modern Bong

28 February 2019

The oldest water pipe known to historians is around 2,400 years old. These relics were made entirely of solid gold, and used exclusively by Scythian tribal chiefs, who prevailed over territory that eventually became modern-day Russia. That’s right – there’s a solid gold bong predating the invention of the wheelbarrow.