Apothecary

I like this shop coz I don’t do ‘real’ drugs, and club 88 is great! Plus the legal highs are a lot safer than the illegal ones, cheap and cheerful stuff, Eleanor, it’s not for teenagers
who listen to Bob Marley!!!

This place is about as rebellious as a 14 year old listening to Bob Marley when he should be doing his homework.
Catering for that strange weed culture we have cultivated in this country (very different from say a cautious or medicinal use) that instead goes along with lifestyle-​proclaiming marijuana posters, ignorant selection of Jamaican culture and associated juvenile humour, typically for the benefit of indulgent middle class teenagers (and those who never grew out of it) or the escapings of the deprived; a culture which encourages apathy and laziness and that often promises male fantasies of coolness or an alternative to a crappy environment.
If that’s your sort of thing, this is the place for you.
The staff are quite friendly if quiet and I suppose they might make really good role models for the young and impressionable who clearly look up to these places as the height of being bad-​ass, totally free or some other nonsense.
Really there is nothing useful in this shop that you probably couldn’t buy somewhere more clean, efficient and basically not pointless and crap. As Fiona mentioned, you can purchase flavoured tobacco and shisha pipes at other respectable Asian stores nearby. Then again if you’re just looking for some cheap legal alternative, that look just like magic mushrooms, for your cool party or to take with you to your dingy room while you listen to the same four reggae songs, or to show off to yours friends behind the bike shed before the school bus arrives, then this place may still have some relevance.

What is the point in this ridiculous shop?! Unless you’re twelve and are trying to impress your friends at school on monday with your fake weed — or rather, ‘herbal highs’ as this place likes to call it — then you probably won’t ever have a reason to come in here.
Aside from legal adaptations of almost all known illegal drugs, this place sells shisha pipes and flavoured tobacco. In short, stuff that you can get in a load of other shops nearby, like Bismillah Food Store, or on holiday for much cheaper.

Apothecary is a rather bizarre shop and not really my scene to be honest. It’s the kind of store that I can imagine a teenage boy would love and then go home and listen to Bob Marley.
They have a really odd mix of merchandise, shisha pipes, bongs, odd wooden ornamental mushrooms and jars with gingers and spices inside.
The staff were very friendly when I popped in and even though this kind of stuff isn’t for me, it does cater for it’s target audience.

Apothecary is definitely the sort of place tha fourteen year olds think is the business and look up to the middle aged owner for selling cannabis seeds, bongs and other smoking apparatus. It all just feels a bit sad and depressing when you walk in, like an underground den for those who are on the cusk of being a badass.
They also sell ‘legal highs’ at extornionate prices. Things like fake magic mushrooms which are merely sneered at by any serious drug users. The guy who owns it is pleasant enough and is well aware of of how to use all the stock which he sells.
It’s not my kind of shop, but if you’re looking for some plant feeder for your illegal crop of pot and need a new pipe to smoke it with, this is the place.

I feel like such a rebel when I walk in here. I also feel terribly conspicuous, as if the whole world knew I were up to no good. Though, to be honest, the only reason I’ve ever come in here is to get guarana, which seems to be all the craze in the UK, even though it’s pretty much only used for fizzy drinks in Brazil. But it’s the South American health craze all over. Let’s use all these things with unpronounceable names. Because the more unpronounceable, the better it is for you. Right?
Well, there seem to be two places you can get guarana from (for all-​night natural energy purposes): Brazilian Sensation or the Apothecary. Sadly, when I was trying to purchase some, the people who were working had no real idea what it was I was talking about. This may not have been about the guarana, though. I may have gone with a list. Anyway, I had to go back and forth from the shop to my friend’s house, checking in every half hour to see if boss-​man had arrived to inform me of whether or not they had whatever it was I needed yet.
So, that kinda brings my appreciation down. But there’s something highly comical about this place. It almost feels like walking into the 70s. Decadence galore!

I’m sure anybody would likely write a glowing review of their local head shop. And I’m no different.
Apothecary is wicked! It stocks a wide selection of smokers’ requisites, discounted rolling trays, hookahs and the like. You can come here for all of your shisha needs, and the staff a re knowledgeable and friendly.
Just don’t expect this shop to be open during normal business hours. It seems to be a case of ‘open when we feel like coming in’, as with all places like this.

Apothecary is found on South Clerk Street, easily reached via a variety of buses that travel up the bridges. Apothecary is a head shop where you can find all the bongs, vapourisers, digital scales and papers and drug paraphernalia you could possibly need. Also found here are many herbs. Things like the hallucinatory plant salvia, and herbal ecstacy. Last new year I went and bought myself some of these herbal pills, and they worked pretty good. Try to remember though, it’s worth doing your research before diving in with these dodgy herbal highs, I certainly learned my lesson on that one. Turned out it wasn’t so much herbal as awaiting classification. Check out Erowid or the Lyceum online, don’t risk taking something you don’t understand.