What's the word - Opium, Alcohol, Marijuana: Legal or Crime? - A function of time

Opium: It was Business for British and a ban in China - finally resulting in the Opium Wars

• A.D. 1200
  Ancient Indian medical treatises The Shodal Gadanigrah and Sharangdhar Samahita describe the use of opium for diarrohea and sexual debility. The Dhanvantri Nighantu also describes the medical properties of opium.
• 1773
  East India Company assumes monopoly over all the opium produced in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Warren Hastingsintroduces system of contracts. Contracts for dealing in opium were awarded through auction.
• 1793 
  The British East India Company establishes a monopoly on the opium trade. All poppy growers in India were forbidden to sell opium to competitor trading companies.
• March 18, 1839 
  Lin Tse-Hsu, imperial Chinese commissioner in charge of suppressing the opium traffic, orders all foreign traders to surrender their opium. In response, the British send expeditionary warships to the coast of China, beginning The First Opium War.
• 1856 After the second opium war, The opium trade was legalised and Christians were granted full civil rights, including the right to own property, and the right to evangelise.
• July 2001
  Portugal decriminalizes all drugs for personal consumption.
• January 2004
  Consumer groups file a lawsuit against Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma. The company is alleged to have used fraudulent patents and deceptive trade practices to block the prescription of cheap generic medications for patients inpain.

Alcohol

The first half of the 20th century saw periods of prohibition of alcoholic beverages in several countries:

• 1907 to 1948 in Prince Edward Island, but for much shorter periods in other provinces in Canada
• 1914 to 1925 in Russia and the Soviet Union
• 1915 to 1922 in Iceland (though beer was still prohibited until 1989)^[2]
• 1916 to 1927 in Norway (fortified wine and beer also prohibited from 1917 to 1923)
• 1919 in Hungary (in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, March 21 to August 1; calledszesztilalom)
• 1919 to 1932 in Finland (called kieltolaki)
• 1920 to 1933 in the United States
• Raid on Alcohol in 1925
• 

Marijuana

Prohibitions of cannabis sativa as a drug arose in many states from 1906 and onward.

In the 1970s, many places in the United States started to decriminalize cannabis

2010 - A $20 Billion industry as per CNBC report today