It's Illegal to Pawn Your Dentures in Las Vegas

This claim is on virtually every 'weird Nevada laws' list ever published, and it usually arrives dressed up with a statute number: NRS 646.060. That citation is what makes the myth feel real — and it's what makes it easy to bust. NRS Chapter 646 is Nevada's pawnbroker chapter, and NRS 646.060, 'Prohibited acts; penalty,' lists everything a pawnbroker may not do: false record entries, refusing police inspection, false reporting, and accepting property from minors, intoxicated persons, or known thieves. Search the full chapter text on the Legislature's own site: 'teeth' and 'denture' do not appear. Anywhere.

The city code doesn't rescue the myth either. LVMC Chapter 6.60, Las Vegas's pawnbroker chapter, is a licensing and record-keeping regime — no denture provision surfaced there, and in all the years this claim has circulated, no listicle has ever produced an actual section number from it. Nor does any other Nevada statute fill the gap: NRS Chapter 631 regulates the practice of dentistry, not the secondhand-denture trade. So where did this come from? It likely mutated from other states' old pawnbroker statutes barring pledges of artificial limbs and wheelchairs, with a side of the argument — pushed by at least one Nevada law-firm blog — that dentures are 'prescription medical devices' the FDA won't let you pawn. That's a federal-classification claim, not a Nevada law, and no NRS section codifies it.

Could a Las Vegas pawnshop still turn away your dentures? Absolutely. Pawnbrokers here operate under heavy regulation — state record-keeping rules, police inspection of records and goods, city licensing under LVMC Chapter 6.60 — but within that framework, any shop can decline any item it doesn't want to hold or resell, and secondhand teeth raise obvious hygiene and valuation problems. What no shop is doing is citing a statute, because none exists. 'The pawnbroker doesn't want your teeth' and 'it's illegal to pawn your teeth' are very different sentences, and only one of them is true.