Texas is the only place in the world with a licensed commercial peyote harvest, and its Department of Public Safety published the distributors’ annual totals for thirty-one years. Licensed distributors reported 1,913,212 buttons sold in 1986, a peak of 2,317,380 in 1997, and 867,674 in 2016, the last year the state required the figures. Over the same span the average price per thousand buttons rose from $78 to $378. At rarecactus.com we compiled every published Texas DPS peyote distributor figure from 1986 to 2016 into one dataset and set it beside the Cactus Conservation Institute’s regrowth study, because the two series explain each other and had never been charted together. Every chart below has its table beneath it, and every number traces to a cited page or paper.

How many peyote buttons has Texas reported selling, 1986 to 2016?

Between roughly 0.9 and 2.3 million buttons a year, with the count falling by more than half between the 1997 peak and 2016. The four charts track buttons sold, reported sales in dollars, the average price per thousand buttons, and the number of licensed distributors. Buttons and dollars move in opposite directions after the late 1990s: fewer plants left the ground while the trade earned more for them, which is what a shrinking wild supply looks like from the inside. The dashed lines mark the 1994 amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which put the Native American Church exemption into federal statute, and the 2016 rule change that ended reporting.

The price column is an annual average, reported sales divided by buttons sold, which is how Keeper Trout tabulates it in his 2014 compilation of the DPS reports. Where the three surviving transcriptions of the DPS tables disagree at the digit level, in 1989, 1990, 1992, 2002, 2003 and 2005, the table keeps Trout’s value and the note column records the others. Distributor counts exist only for the years a source states them: nine in 1988, four in 2003 to 2005, and three from 2006 onward. Nobody has published a count for 1989 to 2002, and the cells stay empty rather than guessed.

Why did Texas stop reporting peyote harvest data in 2016?

A DPS rule change took effect on 6 November 2016 and dropped the requirement that licensed distributors report sales and revenue, so the public series ends that year. The rule is 37 Texas Administrative Code section 13.36, adopted at 41 TexReg 8620. Distributors still hold state licences and federal DEA registration, and the state still records who is licensed, but the annual button and dollar totals that made the decline measurable are no longer collected. The 2016 row is therefore both the lowest button count in the series and the last one anyone will see unless the rule changes again. For the legal framework around the trade, and why only Texas has one, see is it legal to own peyote.

How much does wild peyote regrow after being harvested?

A single correct harvest leaves about nine plants in ten alive after two years, but the plants that survive are much smaller and, if harvested again on a two-year cycle, shrink at every cut. The Cactus Conservation Institute tagged plants in south Texas in 2008 and followed them for six years. Two years after one harvest, 90 percent of harvested plants were alive against 98 percent of controls, and their above-ground volume was still 80 percent below what it had been. Plants harvested every two years lost 44 percent of harvestable crown mass between the first and second cut and a further 32 percent between the second and third. Over the 2012 to 2014 interval, 77 percent of the repeatedly harvested plants survived, against 98 percent of controls. Regrown crowns also carry less of the alkaloid the trade values: 2.01 grams of mescaline per 100 grams of dry tissue in small regrowth crowns against 3.8 in mature unharvested ones, a 47 percent drop.

Read the survival chart interval by interval, not as one cumulative curve. The 2011 paper reports the first two years, the 2012 paper pools once-harvested and repeatedly harvested plants over four years, and the 2014 paper reports the 2012 to 2014 interval only, after the harvested group was split. Sample sizes are in the table. The consequence for the trade is the part that matters: smaller, weaker buttons mean more of them are consumed per ceremony, so harvest pressure feeds itself. That is the mechanism behind the falling button counts above, and it is the argument for seed grown nursery plants over wild harvest that runs through every Lophophora page on this site, including the peyote conservation research overview.

How many licensed peyote distributors remain in Texas?

Three for every year from 2006 to 2015, down from nine in 1988 and roughly twenty-seven in the mid-1970s. Reporting from 2018 to 2020 gives four, so the number moves by one as licences lapse and renew. All of them work the same few counties along the Rio Grande, Starr, Jim Hogg, Webb and Zapata, which is also where the wild range of Lophophora williamsii reaches into the United States. The coarse range map on where peyote grows in the wild shows those counties beside the Mexican states that hold the rest of the species, and the peyote field-number records list every documented wild collection in our database.

Download and cite the data

The trade series, the regrowth figures and the range and elevation bins are free to download as CSV under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and the full bundle is available as JSON. The dataset carries schema.org Dataset markup so it is discoverable in dataset search, and a versioned Zenodo record will be added once the deposit is published. If you use the figures, cite the primary sources listed at the foot of this page and this compilation. For the species themselves, the Lophophora species comparison puts all four accepted taxa side by side, and the Lophophora genus hub holds the rest of the reference material.

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