Nardostachys jatamansi is a small unremarkable herb of alpine meadow and rocky slope in the Himalaya and southwest China, at altitudes where the growing season is a few weeks long. It takes years to build a rhizome worth digging, and digging it kills the plant. Those three facts between them explain both the historical price and the present crisis.
Collection is seasonal and is done by people at the far end of a very long chain, largely in Nepal and Uttarakhand, who are paid a fraction of a percent of what the oil eventually sells for. The trade is legal but licensed, since the species was listed under CITES Appendix II in 1997, and a significant share moves unlicensed.
Cultivation has been attempted repeatedly and mostly fails, because the conditions the plant needs are the ones that make an area uneconomic to farm. Some community forestry programmes in Nepal have had partial success with managed wild harvest, rotating the areas dug and setting a minimum rhizome size.
The perfumery use is now small. What sustains demand is Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine, a herbal supplement market that is not tightly regulated anywhere, and the aromatherapy trade, and the last of these frequently sells other Valerianaceae under the name. A bottle labelled spikenard is not reliably spikenard, which is what Pliny said about it in the first century.