Sorry if this has been answered before. I did a very cursory search before posting. My wife and I were listening to reggae, and talking about how we only hear it in head shops, which then lead us to wonder where the term came from.
As in pothead or acidhead.
“Feed your head” is a relic saying from the 1960s.
“Feed your head” is also found in the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.
The idea behind this is that taking drugs will open your consciousness and allow you to see things and think about them more clearly.
Yep, shops which catered to users of marijuana and psychedelics in the 1960s. Sold them rolling papers, hookahs, anything short of the drugs themselves. Comes into use around the mid 1960s.
The term was often shortened to simply “head” to refer to any general hippie type who used drugs.
Dick Clark, interviewing 13th Floor Elevators’ lead singer Roky Erickson on American Bandstand: “Which one of you is the head of the band?”
Roky: “We’re ALL heads…”
The suffix “-head” to indicate a drug addict goes back to 1911:
It is used in a looser way to indicate a fan of band or singer, like Deadheads for fans of the Grateful Dead, Parrotheads for fans of Jimmy Buffett, and Phishheads for fans of Phish.