Episode 109

Chelsea Cebara's Weed Sexuality Has Gravity

May 19, 2020 | Length: 39m 13s

A special episode with the co-founder of the acclaimed cannabis lubricant brand Velvet Swing. Chelsea Cebara wasn’t a cannabis consumer when the Florida transplant arrived in Seattle. Trained in the scientific method, Cebara came to the creation of her product through unorthodox avenues.

  • Cebara entered the cannabis industry while teaching sex education various Seattle weed and sex shops.
  • A week prior to Washington State legalization, a painful endometriosis attack brought her to the cannabis plant. 
  • Cebara co-founded her brand with the dominatrix and writer Mistress Matisse (Episode 20

Chelsea Cebara on Twitter

Velvet Swing

Mistress Matisse on Twitter

Alex Halperin’s Cannabis Dictionary

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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Podcast transcript

Chelsea Cebara (00:01):
It’s in the stitching of Seattle, the undercurrent of vice, the undercurrent of anti-authoritarianism. You may know this, the famous story about the seamstresses in Seattle. There was a census done, I forget exactly when, in the late 1800s, in Seattle and they asked for gender and occupation and there were, I don’t know the exact number, but a huge number of women listed as seamstress and in all of Seattle there was one sewing machine. Of course, this is because a lot of men came through here on their way up to Alaska, and there was all kind of pioneer traffic and everything like that. And so, the sex work was very profitable here. And, so it started from the very beginning, we have had a lusty relationship with the more illicit sides of sexuality and also not caring that that’s known. We’re like, yeah, Seattle’s a kinky city.

Alex Halperin (01:16):
Welcome to WeedWeek. I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (01:18):
And I’m Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (01:20):
This is a special episode of the WeedWeek podcast. You can subscribe to our free Canada and California newsletters, as well as my original WeedWeek newsletter on www.weedweek.net. And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @weedweeknews, subscribe and review or like our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or any of the other popular platforms.

Donnell Alexander (01:42):
Our episode is special in that in 2018 I sat down with one of my favorite Seattle mothers, Chelsea Cebara, cofounder of the celebrated brand Velvet Swing. And you know what kind of cannabis products Velvet Swing makes Alex?

Alex Halperin (01:56):
They make lube.

Donnell Alexander (01:56):
For cars? Our cars using cannabis, how does this work?

Alex Halperin (02:00):
No, not for cars. It’s for humans. For sex.

Donnell Alexander (02:04):
Yeah. And we haven’t done a story like this. Not one about a former non-consumer from Florida innovating a popular lube product in the nation’s opposite corner.

Alex Halperin (02:17):
It should be a lot of fun.

Donnell Alexander (02:19):
It’s interesting. I took a lot of the sex out just because we’re a cannabis podcast and not a sex podcast. We had to come down somewhere in the middle.

Alex Halperin (02:27):
Have you had any experiences with cannabis lubes, Donny?

Donnell Alexander (02:30):
Yes, but I rather not talk about it. The one thing I will say is that men and women can use them. That’s the surprising element. We talked a little bit about it on the holiday gift guide episode.

Alex Halperin (02:41):
I once used a cannabis lube for research purposes but my partner, her mind was blown away but that had mainly to do with me.

Donnell Alexander (02:55):
Oh, I really want to hear where you’re going with this. That’s not where you are going.

Alex Halperin (02:59):
No, it just didn’t do anything for her. I don’t know if it was the brand or the products in general don’t work for her or maybe don’t work for most people. I’m just not sure.

Donnell Alexander (03:10):
This is addressed in the episode. I give away too much. But like a lot of people report not getting high the first time they smoke, a lot of people who use lubricants, they don’t always report having an experience the first time. Not sure what that’s all about.

Alex Halperin (03:26):
Okay. Maybe that’s what happened.

Donnell Alexander (03:28):
I also will say there’s a lot of variables and I just think some products are better than others. And people say really good things about Velvet Swing.

Alex Halperin (03:36):
I’ll say that the product I used wasn’t Velvet Swing.

Donnell Alexander (03:39):
This is someone worth listening to because she comes from a scientific approach. She’s not just screwing around. But before we talk about this, we have something in a newsier event.

Alex Halperin (03:50):
Yeah, so let’s talk about jobs.

Donnell Alexander (03:53):
I’m happy to have one.

Alex Halperin (03:54):
Yeah, so a survey conducted by Leafly and the National Cannabis Roundtable, that’s the industry lobby fronted by former speaker of the House, John Boehner, found that tens of thousands of jobs would be saved if the industry were able to access federal coronavirus relief. That’s pretty interesting. And it also found that 58% of cannabis businesses have cut their workforce, which is pretty devastating in an industry that has been a pretty positive jobs creator for the last couple of years.

Donnell Alexander (04:29):
When I saw the survey was conducted by the National Cannabis Roundtable, I thought this is where John Boehner earns his money.

Alex Halperin (04:37):
He doesn’t go door to door conducting the survey.

Donnell Alexander (04:40):
I would love to see that. No, I think of this now as a campaign for winning public opinion. It’s not like cannabis users historically have been people to call their politicians and say, “Represent me in DC.” But now’s the time where I think what people think about the industry is going to play a huge role in whether there’s a remedy sent to retailers, growers, processors, etc. I think it was last night on the daily show, I saw a piece about the cannabis industry struggles and when you’re crossing over like that, you are at the beginning of being able to let America know that this essential industry is struggling. I think too much of it happens in private. I feel like this is an ongoing conversation, but I do think that’s the case.

Alex Halperin (05:21):
So, tell us about your conversation with Chelsea.

Donnell Alexander (05:23):
The only thing you need to understand about this Velvet Swing origin story is that Chelsea Cebara wasn’t a consumer of cannabis when she arrived to Washington and what she calls “the ass end of ‘08”, she had a physical condition that brought her to her weed revelation. But just as much the years and months preceding this revelation are what make her story interesting, what’s compelling is that Chelsea wasn’t looking for business. She was looking for a community.

Alex Halperin (05:50):
Here’s what Chelsea Cebara told Donny up in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.

Chelsea Cebara (06:09):
We are a kinky city. It is not a coincidence that “Savage Love” Dan Savage’s column and Mistress Matisse’s column “Control Tower” which was in many alternative weeklies across the country started here. And for our size, our community is as big as New York’s. I moved out here at the ass end of 2005. My husband at the time and I drove out here. I was looking for community and while I was going to school, before I actually got into the meat of my thesis work, I almost moved back to Florida. We went out to our local bar and we met some people and they were friends, they kind of became a friend group, but we were experiencing what is called the Seattle Freeze where people are very nice, they’re very polite, but you can’t get through to the actual friendship and intimacy unless you have a lot of time with them or you have some kind of shared experience or interests that kind of pops that bubble. And drinking at a bar is not sufficient for that. So, we had these friends that like we kind of were there with, we didn’t really vibe, but we liked them, but we couldn’t get through to the deeper intimacy. And coming from Florida, which is the South really, it was very shocking, and I felt very lonely. And a friend of mine in Florida had died and I went back and went to his funeral. He died unexpectedly and I saw my old friends and I was like, “Oh, my friends.” And I came back to Seattle and there was no one, it was nothing, just my partner. And he was working long hours and I was going to school and working, and I was very, very lonely. And then I started doing my thesis work and as a result of this, I put out a call on a polyamory board and said, “I’m a researcher, I’m looking for participants.” And that was fascinating the people that responded to that. It was just if you really want to get hit on, that’s the way to do it first of all, as a young female that will get you hit on. Including a woman that I went out and we did an interview and I found myself attracted to her. One of the cool things about doing this research from the modern perspective at anthropology is you don’t try to maintain that reserve. You don’t try to maintain that distance between you and your subject. You’re part of the research. And if you end up in a romantic relationship with your subject, all the better. And my advisor encouraged me to be in my research. So, we did our interview. Nothing funny during the interview process. But afterwards, she asked me out and I said, okay. And we started dating and I said, “I’m really struggling to find community here, I’m not vibing with people.” And then, I think what she actually said was, “Oh honey, I’ll take you to a party.” And she took me to a party, which later I found out was a sex party. At the time I didn’t see sex happening, but she hadn’t told me that it was a sexy party. I was wearing, I don’t know, I kind of always dressed a little slutty. I’m still trying to learn to not dress slutty, I like to dress slutty. It’s good. I want to be naked all the time and I know I’m going to end up in a nudist colony. I know what’s happening. So, I’m sure I was wearing something that was kind of suggestive. I was married, as I said, I’m not monogamous, so I was dating this woman and was there with her and she was dressed normally and we showed up and the house is like a Bohemian fantasy of tapestries and there’s pillows everywhere and it’s beautiful. This is not like a stoner garage. This is like in the central district. It’s an old house that’s been decked out sumptuously. There’s no overt sexuality going on, but everyone’s just cuddling and talking and maybe holding hands. And I just remember looking around at all of these people, all of these beautiful people and going, this is it. This is my community. Here they are. Here are the freaks. Here are the weirdos. Here are the people who look at life the way that I do.

Donnell Alexander (10:38):
This is before or after the sex?

Chelsea Cebara (10:41):
I never saw the sex. In this one I didn’t, I didn’t know it was a sex party. It was not. Maybe it was a party where it was okay for sex to happen. Maybe it was a sex positive environment where the intent of the party is not sex. But if you find yourself called to do that, they support that and you don’t have to hide that, you know? But I never saw sex happening while it was there. And part of the reason for that was that I was making out with my girlfriend in the upstairs bedroom. I was too busy.

Donnell Alexander (11:14):
Did this go into your report by the way?

Chelsea Cebara (11:16):
Yeah, it did in less lurer terms, but it did, the acknowledgement. I described my relationship with this woman in kind of more clinical terms. But the point of that paper was not really to narratively convey my individual experience. It was more to use my individual experience as an insight on how things are done in this culture. At that party, I also ended up meeting my second husband who was there with his partner at the time. And in my personal life, the woman that I was seeing and I broke up and I did start to see this guy that I met at this party and then as things happen over time, relationships changed. My first husband and I got divorced. We were not a good match. We were very in love, but we were not a good match and I didn’t think I was ever going to get married again. But then I did actually end up getting married to this guy a few years later. In that time, I had the good fortune of being laid off. I had put myself through school in part doing corporate leasing, which if you can imagine how I looked at this time, I had this bright red shaved head side thing.

Donnell Alexander (12:40):
What is that business? What is that leasing?

Chelsea Cebara (12:42):
It was rental properties for business entities and I also did residential leasing. It doesn’t require a real estate license. So, it’s good for entry level and the money is very good. So, I would take clients on tours of office spaces or of apartments, you know, leasable properties, rental properties and showed them around. And then if they decided that they wanted to sign a lease, I would draft the lease and take them through it. And it was great. It was sales basically, but it was fun. It was enjoyable. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. But then I graduated from college directly into the recession and couldn’t find anything, I mean, an anthropology degree. It’s very useful, but nobody’s hiring anthropologists. So, I went back to leasing because I needed some money and it was fine. I was doing some corporate leasing and then the company, the building that I was working out of was sold and the company laid a bunch of people off, myself included. And that was a turning point because then I was liberated suddenly, violently from my employment. And at this moment, I stopped thinking of myself as an employee and I started thinking of myself as a sentient collection of marketable skills. And this is I think something that a lot of millennials, went through, they said all of a sudden traditional employment isn’t working, I’m an old millennial. What skills do I have that I can monetize? And then we ended up with the gig economy and I was very much a creature of the gig economy. I went, well, what can I do? What do I know how to do? I know about sex, I can teach people about sex. I know how to bake. So, I sat a small baking business, I have always loved to bake and I had a home based baking business for a while. I was doing burlesque. I can monetize that. It’s not a huge income, but it is not nothing. I was 25, I had $5, but it was always just two hours here, two hours there, and the ups and downs of self-employment gigging as a primary source of income is very stressful. And then I looked for a buffer to that stress in the form of a day job. I was starting to look for something that’s a part time job that I know at least I’ll get a hundred dollars every week. So, some months you make four grand, some months you make nothing and some months you make nothing two months in a row. I was just at this process when I was over at my friend’s house, we were just hanging out and I had an onset of endometriosis pain, endometriosis being when there’s uterine material outside the uterus and the pain is excruciating. Every time you get your period, the tissue swells. But it has nowhere to go. And so, your abdomen is contracting and it’s vomiting and just horrendous. It’s awful pain. If the house was on fire, I could not have left. I would give birth four times again before I want to go through endometriosis again. This is happening. I’m a complete wreck and my friend says, you should smoke some weed. And I said, no, no, I don’t even like weed. Like, she’s like, no, no, you don’t understand. You need to do this. Take two bong rips. And I’m desperate. I’ve tried everything. I’ve been on prescription pain killers, muscle relaxers, all this stuff. None of it has ever helped. And here I am on the floor on my friend’s house, and she’s offering me a bong. And I’m saying, okay, fine. So I did two bong rips and in 10 minutes the pain was gone. I didn’t even feel high. The pain was gone. And I said, what is that? Where is that from? Where can I get that? And she told me that her friend was actually the source of this cannabis and that she was opening up a medical dispensary. And this is the dawning of legalized medical cannabis in Washington. This is literally day one, it was a week away from day one of opening the doors of legal, medical cannabis. I had to find out about it. It was such a transformative experience. I had to know everything. That’s just how my mind works. And maybe the education that I received is why I need to understand, I need to pick it apart. I need, I want to know this intimately.

Donnell Alexander (17:41):
Don’t skip over that part. Can you just go on a little more about that? Why do you connect those two things?

Chelsea Cebara (17:47):
It’s just a way of relating to the world and to new information, a thirst for understanding and that I think did come from growing up in an unstructured learning environment where learning is pleasurable and passionate instead of something that is authoritatively imposed. And I really wanted to understand why this had healed me, or at least it had addressed my symptoms in such a profound and noticeable way when nothing else ever had. I ended up talking to the friend who was opening the dispensary, and this is at the time where I’m looking for a job and she said, “Hey, I’m actually looking for someone to run the front desk.” Awesome. Interviewed and I have my day job and I start learning and I’m working there in this environment. I’m learning everything as from the experienced people that are there. I’m reading of my own accord and trying to find out what is the deal with cannabis as a medicine. And eventually I did a bud tend there. I started actually helping people connect with the right strains and stuff like that. And I worked there off and on and that’s where the bulk of my experience came from and my just kind of voracious consumption of what exists out there as anecdotal.

Donnell Alexander (19:13):
So, where do these worlds merge? Because you are like a go getter who is interested in anthropological stuff and this pot entering the picture. Where do you get to the point where you’re making the product? Where did you being?

Chelsea Cebara (19:26):
Well it began when I was working at this dispensary, which now that became a recreational pot shop because everything unfortunately moved under the purview of recreational law, which was a bad thing for patients. It’s really unfortunate. But at this time, I’m bud tending as a day job and I start seeing products coming in that are designed for sexuality and they’ve got these hilarious names like Hempy Endings or the Toke and Poke, it’s awful. So, I’m seeing this stuff and because of my background in sex education and sexuality and sexual health, I am looking at the ingredients on these and going, whoa, you can’t put that in a vagina. That is a yeast infection waiting to happen. You can’t, this is formulated really poorly.

Donnell Alexander (20:22):
Give me some examples of some of the stuff.

Chelsea Cebara (20:24):
Glycerin, which is just food for yeast. And it might be okay for some women, maybe not. There were butane extractions that would contain residual butane. And I don’t have any scientific data on why putting butane residue in your vagina might be a bad idea, but I can guarantee you I won’t do that and I won’t let anyone else do that if I can help it. So I realized that there was this world of people who knew a lot about cannabis and there’s this world of people who knew a lot about sex, but that there wasn’t really anyone in between those worlds that was making products. And I started as a first step teaching sex and cannabis workshops because not only there were these kinds of awful products, not all of them, some of them were great or at least were good. There was a complete lack of acknowledgement or conversation around the fact that this is a mind-altering substance. That if you include it into your sexuality, brings up questions of consent and of meaningful consent. It is something that is new, and I think we need to be emphasizing it more. There are some people who would say if you are in any way altered that your consent is invalidated. And I don’t believe that. I believe that you can make your own risk assessments and that human beings are pretty resilient if you go into things mindfully and knowingly. That said, we do need to talk about it, and we have an existing cultural understanding of alcohol as it comes to bear on consent, that you can be too drunk to consent. And there are things that you should do if you’ve had a few drinks to think about if you really want to do stuff. In the sex positive world, we’re very practiced at being intentional prior to sexual activity. We set out: This is what I want to do. This is my yes, my no, my maybes. Here’s what I’m open to. Here’s what you want. Here’s the last time I was tested. Here’s my relationship structure. This is all normalized in the sex positive community, is not normalized in the Muggle community. I take that from J.K. Rawling’s Harry Potter books. It’s a way a way of saying normal people without being pejorative because there’s nothing wrong with being normal. It’s just our dominant culture doesn’t encourage us to speak intentionally and openly about sexuality, which is why I wanted to do something about that. So, we’re not having the conversation of we’re going to smoke a joint together. Sometimes weed makes people go nonverbal. I’m not too high, but I’m having a hard time speaking. How can I tell you with hand squeezes yes or no, do more, do less, please stop. That kind of thing. Especially if you have an edible because you can get way too out there with an edible and you combine with alcohol or other drugs and all of this other stuff that goes into the mix. I’m not saying don’t get high and screw, I actually think that’s a great idea, but know what you’re doing. Know your body, know how your body reacts to cannabis. And this was the meat of my workshop, that you need to know what’s out there, what options exist. There are psychoactive options. There are non-psychoactive options. You don’t have to get high and you need to know yourself and you need to be able to communicate with your partner and you need to have contingencies for if your yes becomes a maybe not midstream during the activities.

Donnell Alexander (24:25):
These are the conversations you’re having at your workshop.

Chelsea Cebara (24:28):
Yes.

Donnell Alexander (24:29):
Did you do many of them?

Chelsea Cebara (24:32):
Yeah, they actually became very popular.

Donnell Alexander (24:38):
Show me what a good one looks like.

Chelsea Cebara (24:39):
My slides have gotten much better than they used to, but it starts off…

Donnell Alexander (24:42):
But I’m in the room, you know, just in terms of what you’re looking at from the podium.

Chelsea Cebara (24:47):
Well, most of these happen in sex shops or in pot shops. Originally just mostly in sex shops. Babeland was fantastic. I started working with them and they continued to be great to work with. I would stand surrounded by dildos and whips and people come in, you know, who have either signed up or sometimes people just come in who are walking in off the street and they’re interested in the topic. We did different formats. Sometimes we would be sitting, the store was closed, and it would only be people who had registered in advance or something. And most of these folks, wide variety of folks, most of these folks wanted easy answers, like the guy in the back, and I’m sorry, but it is always a guy. There’s the guy in the back saying, “What strains are going to make my wife horny? My wife doesn’t want to have sex anymore. What strains do I give her to make her horny again?”

Donnell Alexander (25:46):
I’m gonna give you credit for being the first person to do a voice. That’s nice. So, there’s always a guy.

Chelsea Cebara (25:55):
It’s this guy. And first of all, I’m like, “Well, if your wife doesn’t have want to have sex anymore, probably the solution is not a joint. Probably the solution is communication about what’s going on with her.” And the second part of it is that it’s not that simple because of the uniqueness of everyone’s endocannabinoid system, which is incredibly unique. What works for me might not work for his wife. And there’s a process of discovery that’s just inherent to cannabis, which is kind of the reasons why it’s resisted commodification. And I think definitely spoke to my little black anarchist heart because it’s so you, you can’t isolate cannabinoids and have them do the same thing that the whole plant does. And Western science is amazing. I’m a huge fan of science. But it seeks to isolate variables and then say this is the part that works. This is the therapeutic part. And that’s what we did with THC. This is the active ingredient. But if you have straight up THC or it’s synthetic Marinol, you have a bad time. It’s not pleasant. And that’s because it’s not meant to work in isolation. It’s meant to work symphonically with the other compounds, there’s like 88 or 102 something. The number changes all the time depending on where you ask known cannabinoids.

Donnell Alexander (27:29):
Do you see parallels in your own life between how this works? I mean, because it seems like your core stuff.

Chelsea Cebara (27:37):
You know, I never thought about that actually, but you’re probably onto something.

Donnell Alexander (27:40):
So how do you get there? How do you get there to becoming someone who’s making stuff?

Chelsea Cebara (27:45):
Well, once I was doing that, I was sharing with my sex positive community. I was making a cannabis lube on my stove top and topicals are my area of prime primary fascination, topically applied cannabis or topicals for short is just cannabis infused into oil. Similar to how you make brownies or something like that. You would infuse them into butter. It’s the same thing only infused into an oil that you then would rub on your skin. There’s a lot of versions of this and it gets way more complex, but it turns out you have these endocannabinoid receptors on your skin and in the immediate tissue underneath. Basically, anywhere that oil lives, there tend to be these receptors, which is interesting. And cannabinoids are powerful anti-inflammatories. I have to be clear that I’m not making any medical claims here. This is all with an asterisk of many people say, I have heard, my personal experience has been and things like that. They’re also a vasodilator, which means they will bring blood to tiny blood vessels, particularly THC but other ones as well. And if you do this, if you do an infusion, there’s a particular kind that you can do, and I try to retain as much of the whole plant as possible. So, I do a really short-term infusion. If you then use that with coconut oil or olive oil as a lube, you get this vasodilation effect and increase the sensitivity. I just am obsessed with topical applications in the first place. I think they’re really underutilized and really amazing and especially using them for sex, it’s phenomenal. The vasodilation, the flushing is distinct from warming lubes and sensitizing lubes because it interacts with your body’s native systems of arousal. Warming lubes and sensitizing lubes create an exterior sensation of cold or tingling. Cannabinoids applied topically just cause this kind of natural flushing similar to what you would get if you were horny and trying to focus in a board meeting or something like that. It feels normal after about 20 minutes, and good luck getting the funding to study this, although there is someone trying to study right now and I’m trying to boost her signal as much as possible. But after about 20 minutes of absorption, many people experience an amplification of orgasm and I can’t understand why the whole world isn’t turned on to this. This is the coolest thing.

Donnell Alexander (30:48):
You get an amplification of orgasm? Tell me the difference.

Chelsea Cebara (30:51):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s similar to the first time you smoke, you don’t get high sometimes, people report that a lot. It’s similar to that. The first time that I used it, I first got some cannabis lube that my friend made, and I tried it. And the first one I was like, “I don’t really think I noticed anything.” And I tried it again and I was like, “Oh, it’s a little bit, little bit better, a little bit more I’m noticing.” And the third time that I tried it, I was like, “I’m going to make that.” It’s really amazing and I recommend it to everybody.

Donnell Alexander (31:28):
How did you get out in the world?

Chelsea Cebara (31:30):
I was at this point when I was making it on my stove. This is just sharing with friends at this point. I’m doing these workshops and I’m making this stuff. And my friend from the sex positive community and sex education community, Mistress Matisse, she knows our CEO. They were friends for a long time.

Mistress Matisse (31:54):
One fine day I ran into a friend of mine who said, “Oh, I just got the craziest job. I’ve been made CEO of a pot company” and said, “Really?” And I called my friend and said, “Chelsea we have a moment here, I have a connection. You have this talent.” So, we pitched the idea of this cannabis lube to this pot company and they were very interested in it.

Chelsea Cebara (32:23):
And she contacted me and said, “I’ve got a line on a company that has an emulsion technology. They are willing to make a product line for me, but I need someone to make it. Do you want a job in the cannabis industry? And at first I said, “I’ve got a job in the cannabis industry, I’m fine” but she kept saying, “Hey, I think we should do this eventually.” And I was contracting for a little bit and then they talked me into coming on full time and to create the formula.

Donnell Alexander (33:00):
So, what’s that process like?

Chelsea Cebara (33:03):
It’s a lot of trial and error. I mean, I come from a social science background, not a hard science background, but the scientific method is pretty much what I did, and I had a knowledge of what goes into a lube. Fortunately, it’s not as complex because you want to keep the ingredients minimal. You want it to just be as little as possible. And we just experimented with different ingredients, different arrangements, different proportions. And then we use the base emulsion, which is their proprietary technology. And that is fortunately pretty clean also. It doesn’t have a lot of funny stuff going on in there. It’s all vaginally compatible. And then we did a lot of testing.

Donnell Alexander (33:50):
Over what period of time are we talking that this happened?

Chelsea Cebara (33:52):
It took about eight months.

Donnell Alexander (33:55):
What were the initial results like?

Chelsea Cebara (33:57):
The results so far were orgasmic enhancement, sensitivity enhancement, always really good. The consistency of the lube itself was really the tricky part because I knew from experience what cannabinoids to put in at what ratios and that was just because of my knowledge with the cannabis world with certain terpenes that will enhance absorption of cannabinoids. Certain cannabinoids in certain ratios will work synergistically.

Donnell Alexander (34:31):
How did you know Mistress Matisse before?

Chelsea Cebara (34:33):
Oh, we were both sex educators and we’ve been in the sex positive world together.

Donnell Alexander (34:37):
How did you meet her? Do you remember meeting her?

Chelsea Cebara (34:40):
Well, at a party, of course.

Donnell Alexander (34:45):
What part of the party are you most comfortable sharing? On this podcast you can share a it all, but I’m just saying.

Chelsea Cebara (34:52):
Oh goodness.

Donnell Alexander (34:54):
Was the connection purely sexual? I mean how did you connect with her?

Chelsea Cebara (34:57):
Oh no, we have not had sex, we’ve been a lot of sexual situations together.

Donnell Alexander (35:06):
So just flirting for really long.

Chelsea Cebara (35:09):
I don’t know, I mean, what is flirting? I can’t help but flirt with everything. But the first time we met I was absolutely too intimidated to go up to her. She’s a local celebrity, right? I’ve been reading her column. I can’t believe I’m seeing this person, she’s gorgeous and I’m just like, what do I do? And I was very young at the time as well. The first time I met her I was, “Oh, hi, nice to meet you.” And that was it. And then our communities overlapped a lot. So, we ended up at parties together. Her partner had me suspended in rope over the penthouse of an apartment building one time. But it was great. It was fun. So, we knew each other from that. We knew each other from just being in the same community. And she knew that I did this and may have partaken of the lube that I was making.

Donnell Alexander (36:02):
Did she say favorable things?

Chelsea Cebara (36:04):
Yes. But she never liked how oily how oily it was. And this is just a problem with cannabinoids because they’re only oleophilic. They want to be with other oils and since oils work well for lube, it’s very easy to just infuse them into oils and then use those oils as lube. But oils do have some drawbacks. They are staining, they are kind of messy and they smell like weed and it’s not a problem for me to smell like weed, I actually like the smell of weed. But a lot of people I’ve been learning now in my current capacity, don’t, they don’t want to smell weed in their sexual experience.

Donnell Alexander (36:47):
So, you’re still working these things out, correct?

Chelsea Cebara (36:49):
Well, now we’ve got it. We’re on the market and we’re number one.

Alex Halperin (36:55):
Our guest was homeschooled back in Orlando, Florida. Chelsea Cebara’s parents are Laura Baugh and Bobby Cole, both professional golfers. It happened that they discussed raising Chelsea and her six siblings in last Sunday’s USA Today, we’ll include a link to that on the podcast show page.

Donnell Alexander (37:13):
And that is our show for this week. If you would like to offer feedback, go with hello@weedweek.net, but before you do that, before you begin that project, here’s Alex with his weekly Twitter thing.

Alex Halperin (37:26):
We’re thrilled to welcome @HilaryCorrigan as our new reporter.

Donnell Alexander (37:38):
What’s her background?

Alex Halperin (37:39):
Hilary lives in Oregon and she’s got a great background in energy and environmental reporting and you should check out the website because she’ll be filing original stories for us daily, which means we’ve got original reporting and analysis on the site just about every day.

Donnell Alexander (37:59):
Yeah, it’s a great addition. I love people with reporting backgrounds coming into the weed industry, covering it. Thanks for listening. We have new episodes on the website every Tuesday morning. You can also catch me Friday at five west coast time in our Instagram live podcast Freezer Stash. This week I’ll have Mary Jane Gibson and Elvis McGovern, the alleged MacGyver of weed from episode 70 and we’ll have a drink.

Alex Halperin (38:24):
Also, make sure you enter our contest to win an autograph copy of the cannabis dictionary I pinned. As you may have heard, Forbes gave my book its highest weed recommendation. You can enter by signing up for our one of our newsletters at WeedWeek, WeedWeek Canada and WeedWeek California. They’re all free and they’re all at www.weedweek.net. And if you’ve listened this far, subscribe and review or like us on Google Play, iHeart radio, Stitcher, or wherever it is you happen to be here. I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (38:56):
And I am Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (38:57):
Our show’s produced by Donnell Alexander, engineered by Larry Buhl and Alicia Byer wrote our theme music. We’ll catch you again here next week.

Donnell Alexander (39:05):
Later.