D Gary Young : The Essential Oils Baron
Founder of global company has deep roots in North Idaho
Out there in the British Columbian wilderness, out among the towering hemlock and tamarack where he felt at home, a logger named Gary Young labored happily. The year was 1973.Maneuvering atop 12 feet of snow on showshoes, Young plied his trade meticulously, using a cutting method that would create a domino effect of falling trees, calculated carefully to crash directly away from him.
One did not.
“A tree came back and drilled me through my snow shoes like a post,” Young says. “Later they told me that when they found me, the snow shoes were up around my crotch.”There the unconscious Young was encased in Canadian snow, dying.
And there Young Living was being born.It was a painful birth.
According to Young, his spinal cord had been broken in two places. Sixteen vertebrae were crushed, along with 11 ruptured discs. That damage was complemented by 19 broken bones, he says, and three skull fractures.
“I spent three weeks in a coma, four months in intensive care and a year in a rehab center,” he says. “Then I spent 13 years learning to walk again.”
But he did a lot more than re-learn the art of walking. He learned about essential oils and what he and many others claim are their curative powers.
“I did my own research because there were no books written about it, no other research being done,” he says. “It was a feeling. I had such a strong feeling about the potential of the blood of the plant, which essential oil is.”
Embarking on paths of alternative medicine, Young’s research ultimately took him to Europe and in 1989, after a decade in France distilling lavender and seeing what it could do, Young settled on a quarter-acre near Spokane to build his own distillery. He fashioned it by welding two pressure cookers connected with copper wire and began his own experiments by using steam to draw essential oils out of various plants.
That initial feeling, which grew to confirmed belief, was fueled by personally experiencing the oils’ ability to stimulate cell regeneration, he says. Along the way he says he found powerful applications for treating burns, headaches, joint pain, even cancer. In 1992 Young purchased 160 acres just outside St. Maries, Idaho, where fields of lavender and Melissa now flourish around a large distillery, and a year later Young Living Essential Oils with its multi-level marketing sales approach was established in Riverton, Utah.
With it came controversy.
Lina McNab, from Lethbridge, Alberta, helps unload a batch of wood chips after the oil was extracted at a facility in St. Maries.
An organization called Quackwatch — “Your Guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions,” its website says — doesn’t think highly of Gary Young. A piece on quackwatch.org written by Dr. Stephen Barrett offers a scathing indictment of Young and his products.
Dr. Barrett’s article, which indicates it was last updated in June 2006, concludes with this excerpted summary:
• Gary Young is an uneducated huckster with a track record of arrests for health fraud. He has repeatedly inflated and falsified his education, credentials, and experiences.
• Young Living’s essential oils cannot treat or cure any medical illness.
The insults and outright assaults from traditional medical practitioners and their defenders are nothing new to Young. He’s seen and heard it all, he says, but he’s still going strong.
“A lot of people laughed at me,” Young says. “I’ve been called a snake oil salesman, a witch doctor.”
According to Young, the pharmaceutical industry is the latest to paint a bull’s-eye on him because it can’t duplicate his essential oils.
“They’ve offered me a lot of money to develop a formula for them so they can synthesize it,” he says, adding that synthetic oils are worthless. “They can’t patent this. We’re fighting against Big Pharma 24/7, every single day.”
Penny Cosner operates a chipping machine by remote control as trees are harvested near Naples.
Call him what you will — witch doctor, snake oil salesman, even uneducated huckster — but be sure to include “resilient” in there somewhere.
Young has built an international company that last year reached $250 million in sales, he says, with annual average sales growth of 26 percent — from 16 percent growth in the U.S. to 1,000 percent in Peru. Young Living is the world’s largest producer of essential oils for aromatherapy, he says, boasts the largest research team and the largest distributor network of essential oils on the planet.
If that isn’t resilience to critics, consider this: Much of the work is done not just by volunteers, but by volunteers who pay $100 a week for the privilege of putting in arduous 10-hour shifts each day. And by all appearances, they love every minute of it.
As the coldest days and nights give way, Young and his work crews in North Idaho have very little time left for winter harvest.
Standing near teams of massive, powerful draft horses that drag felled balsam fir trees to a powerful chipper that shoots chopped wood and needles into a semi trailer, Young tips his hard-hat back for a moment and smiles.
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