In my early years with Young
Living, I was a big fan of its founder and CEO, Gary Young. I particularly
loved hearing Young’s stories about building the company from nothing.
Even then, however, I remember
being alarmed when he described making a homemade distiller by welding two
pressure cookers together.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for
DIYing, but for me, safety always comes first.
The more I read into Young
Living, the more I started to realize that perhaps all this “hoopla” about Gary
Young’s distillery prowess (like this blog post or this and this history sketch) might
be just edge on the sided of distorted marketing mumbo jumbo. I was worried.
Could Gary Young’s really be feigning expertise in an area of something
seemingly so complex?
Then, in 2000, my fears were
confirmed.
That year, on August 17, one of
Gary Young’s famous homemade distillers dramatically ruptured. The explosion of
the huge distillery fatally wounded Juan Gomez, a father of four, and a worker
at the Young Living farm in Mona, Utah.
This heartbreaking episode spurred
an eye-opening UOSHD investigation. The findings were shocking. Not only was the fatal accident avoidable,
UOSHD realized that in many ways Gary Young’s purported “expertly developed”
distillers were actually fraught with errors and high-risk elements. One UOSHD
report on case reads:
“No
consideration was given in the design and construction of distillation vessels
with respect to American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) requirements
pertaining to the design and construction of pressure vessels.”[1]
In fact, the agency further
exposed that the exploding vessel had not been equipped with a single type of safety device that could
relieve overpressurization. Eventually,
Gary Young unit was cited with over seven different violations.
At first, when I read the UOSHD report, I
found myself wanting to defend Young.
Perhaps, he was unaware of the risks. Perhaps, Gary Young’s true lack of
distillery education (see M.D. Eva F. Briggs,
article) prevented him from
anticipating such an error.
But, it turns out that only a
year earlier UOSHD had found and warned YLEO that Gary’s distillers were
subpar. In fact, two other YELO distillation units were forcefully taken out of
service after the inspector noticed safety violations. A year later—without
significant safety adjustments made—the August 17th tragedy occurred.
Ultimately, I can’t stop thinking about the
implications of this preventable tragedy. If the Young Living founder is this
flippant about the safety of his employees, how can I possibly trust the safety
of Young Living’s essential oils?
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