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Jorge Cervantes is old school. He smokes joints. He wrote a book that's never going to make it onto Kindle.
Cervantes—real name George Van Patten—is the author of The Cannabis Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to Cultivation & Consumption of Medical Marijuana (self-published, 596 pages, $50). He is visiting relatives in Portland on his way to Seattle's Hempfest—his trunk filled with copies of his 330,000-word tome. Looking every bit the hippie with his long blond hair, full white beard, and brown-tinted sunglasses, Cervantes notes it's been 32 years since he printed his first marijuana-growing book, Indoor Marijuana Horticulture, by renting a lithograph at the Instaprint on Southeast 82nd Avenue and Foster Road. The book sold more than 1 million copies, Cervantes claims, and was dubbed the "Indoor Grower's Bible."
Cervantes turned his early authorial success into the Jorge Cervantes' Indoor Garden Store in Portland, selling high-intensity discharge light systems of his own invention, until he was raided and shut down by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1989. After what he calls the scariest years of his life, he republished his first book as Gardening Indoors With Soil & Hydroponics in 1995 and left the country, staying mostly in Spain. He and his wife, Estella, eventually moved back to the U.S. in 2006, buying a home in Sonoma, Calif. Seven years ago, he started work on The Cannabis Encyclopedia, calling it his final book. He said he broke down emotionally and had to stop writing the opus at least once a year.
"After 33 years of writing for money, publicly, I'm pretty good at it," Cervantes says. "But now I have made enough money to hire good editors to make the writing great."
Cervantes calls his tome a "true encyclopedia with everything in it," complete with a background on medical cannabis and gardening case studies he recommends reading before starting a grow. Fifty pages are devoted to nutrient deficiencies in soil. Fifty more are dedicated to pest control, and another 50 to hydroponics.
This book isnât just for advanced gardeners, however. There are step-by-step pictorial instructions on how to make a tincture and to create clones, which he calls âthe most traumatic incident cannabis plants can experience.â He also opines on the proper way to add cannabis to beer (using kief, hashish or oil) and to make cannabis wine, âthe only original style of wine created in the New World.â The only marijuana-related question left out was how to roll a joint, which Cervantes was happy to demonstrate at a table outside Crema cafe. He rolled it Spanish-style.
GO: Jorge Cervantes will sign copies of The Cannabis Encyclopedia in the public lobby of Oregon's Finest, 1327 NW Kearney St., 971-254-4765, ofmeds.com, on Thursday, Aug. 27, 6-8 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015