For those of us among Chelsea Handler’s massive social media following, we already know that her love of cannabis is hardly a secret habit. She plays the part of advocate, drawing necessary attention to the issues of legalization and injustice, while also chronicling her personal consumption routine as part of her daily posts. 

The comedienne and author also recently alluded to working on building a cannabis company of her own and now it’s official. As the special guest speaker at Canndescent's Stylus launch party on Saturday night, she shared exclusively with The Hollywood Reporter she had just signed a deal earlier that day to partner with San Francisco-based operator NorCal Cannabis Company to launch her own cannabis line. 

Chelsea Handler talks cannabis with Canndescent CEO Adrian Sedlin at the Stylus launch party in Los Angeles, Calif. on February 9, 2019.

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Presented in partnership with Civilized — the Canadian cannabis media outlet she traveled with on a speaking tour last fall — the exclusive, invite-only evening was held at The Montalbán theatre and included "a vape immersion experience" followed by a candid conversation between Handler and Canndesecent CEO Adrian Sedlin.

She told THR, “I didn’t want to do licensing; I didn’t want to do some bull shit weed line. It really means a lot to me, what [cannabis] has done for my friends and the people who have been re-introduced, so it’s a female-centric kind of motivation and I want to do a line that represents that, to reintroduce women to the marketplace, so that’s my goal.”

Through her relationship with Civilized, Handler discovered Canndescent, which since its start in 2015, has focused solely on cultivating top-shelf flower and is known for being the first municipally-permitted facility in California and the first cannabis company in the world to abandon traditional strain names. Instead, the Santa Barbara-based operation focuses on effects-based branding in five, single-origin signature formulas: Calm, Cruise, Create, Connect and Charge.

Canndescent's new Stylus vaporizer pen retails for $60 and is available in dispensaries and via select delivery services throughout California.

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Designed deliberately to look like an actual pen, Sedlin says of the new line, “We conceived Stylus to inspire consumers to write their story and transform their lives. For this to happen, the product must invigorate the five senses from the moment they see its silhouette, feel its velvety weight, smell its bouquet, taste its essence, and ultimately, exhale with a renewed outlook.”

The rechargeable, reusable device — complete with a clipped cap to protect the mouthpiece from dust and debris — is compatible with Canndescent’s “ultra-clear” oil cartridges (a disposable “ready-to-use” version is coming to market later this month). Using a “cold and slow” CO2 extraction process, the Canndescent team sourced its cuttings from its own garden to ensure its oils never come with the common burnt taste often experienced when vaporizing and to mirror the cannabinoid and terpene profiles of its proprietary strains. Each ceramic cartridge ($50) contains 500 milligrams, which delivers approximately 200 draws.

The Stylus itself ($60) is equipped with a magnetic locking mechanism for easy cartridge swapping and three temperature settings to allow for varying levels of potency per hit. A velvet dust bag in the brand’s Hermes-evoking orange is also included in every first-edition, collector’s box.

With an encouraging, official tagline (and hashtag) to “write your story,” cannabis has enabled Handler to do just that. Her sixth memoir, Life Will Be the Death of Me will be released on April 9 with a new documentary about white privilege she penned and stars in set to drop on Netflix in July.

Canndescent's ceramic cartridges ($50) contain 500 milligrams, which delivers approximately 200 draws.

COURTESY: CANNDESECENT

She told the audience, which also was treated to a Q&A, that she started turning to cannabis more to help her focus and manage stress while working on writing projects and that it allowed her to complete them in excellence. 

“I’d much rather be taking something from the ground than from some disgusting pharmaceutical company that’s poisoning us with opioids and then making another trillion dollars to discover the cure for it! … Now we understand that we were basically living during Prohibition. This is gonna be the thing that probably cures some big disease and then everyone’s going to go, ‘Oh whoopsie, I can’t believe people were put in prison for smoking, for a dime bag,’” said Handler.

Through her Instagram stories, cannabis is seemingly a proud part of Handler’s everyday lifestyle — whether waking up with her beloved dogs, in the gym with her trainer, on a ski trip with her family or getting ready in her closet (also home to two refrigerated drawers where she keeps an enviable supply of edibles at the ready).

She personally prefers Canndescent’s Connect, which the brand describes as, “when it’s time to laugh, go out with friends or get intimate” and Calm to help her sleep. 

Handler summed up her newfound image from the stage, "You are not a stoner just because you get high. Do you know how much shit I get done?"