Button, button, who's got the button?

Commerce, Religion, Drug Regulation and Conservation
in the Current Peyote Trade of the Texas Borderlands.

Total annual sales of peyote buttons
by all registered peyote distributors,
as accounted for by the Texas Department of Public Safety,
from 1986 to 2014.

Upper curve is number of buttons sold.
Lower curve is total sales in dollars.

[Click here to see the actual numbers.]

Implicit in these numbers is this fact:
While the cost per button has risen in a more or less linear fashion over time, the cost per gram of peyote tissue (which corresponds to the cost per amount of peyote required for sacramental use per person) has increased dramatically with the marked reduction in average size of the buttons being sold.

Cactus Conservation Institute