MEDELLIN, Columbia – As part of my ongoing quest to find the Next Big Thing in the world of business, I’ve been doing a lot of research using the most reliable platform for insider information, hot trends and valuable real-world perspective available to the serious entrepreneur today: the growing collection of original programming offered by Netflix.

After discarding the notion of becoming a very corrupt, murderous, bisexual President of the United States as an impractical and overly time-consuming approach to ascending into “1-percenter” status, the next idea I scratched off my list was opening a for-profit women’s prison in New York. As it turns out, building a prison — while not nearly as expensive as running for President — still would quickly exhaust my initial investment capital of $1,371.43.

Further study of the Netflix Index, however, has brought me here to Medellin, Colombia, a place with a rich history of producing entrepreneurs who think “outside the box” — mostly because inside the box is likely to be the first place Customs officials look when searching your truck for contraband.

While I now wish I had finished watching the whole first season of Narcos before hopping on a plane to Medellin (spoiler alert: it seems Pablo Escobar has been dead for some time, at least according to the locals I’ve spoken with), I don’t regret coming here. The new business insights my research into the inhalable stimulants industry has bestowed upon me are fabulously useful.

One of the first things I endeavored to understand was the high price of Escobar’s core product, the white, powdery substance known as “cocaine” (and also by various entertaining street names like “blow,” “snow,” “toot” and “Santa’s Little Helper”).

Unfortunately, snorting several massive lines of the stuff didn’t yield the answers I was hoping for, although it did appear to contribute to my ability to respond to more than 80 emails in only 14 minutes, and I must admit I haven’t defecated this effortlessly in years.

Undaunted, I did a few more lines and jogged up and down the stairs of my hotel for a couple hours until it hit me: Cocaine is expensive precisely because it’s illegal.

While I’ll probably abstain from trying to recreate Escobar’s coke-smuggling empire, it occurs to me my tachycardia-related epiphany about the reason for cocaine’s high price point could have instructive value for my future adult entertainment endeavors, but only if all of us in the adult industry can come together and persuade governments around the world to ban porn.

Yes, you read that right: We need to ban porn in order to save it.

Banning porn to save the porn industry may seem counter-intuitive, but in addition to raising the price of our product back above its online consumer-perceived value of $0.00, here are four other reasons the adult industry should lobby the U.S. Congress and the governments of other countries to ban porn.

Good Publicity: Since so many people think porn is a terrible, awful, corrupting influence on men, women, transgender individuals, hobbits and young people (not to mention lab rats), just imagine how much positive PR buzz the industry could generate by coming out as staunchly against the distribution and sale of our own products. Finally, we would be seen not only as part of the problem, but part of the overbearing, excessive, earth-scorching solution, as well. Let’s face it, positioning ourselves as champions of the First Amendment hasn’t won us much public support, so maybe it’s finally time to try a different course and defect to the side of the decency crusaders.

Significant reduction of expenses: We all know it’s far cheaper to produce gonzo porn than it is to produce a big feature like Pirates or Operation Desert Stormy or Watersportsworld, but obviously nothing is less expensive than not making movies at all. Plus, if you aren’t considering depicting fisting or copraphagia in a porn video, then you don’t have to waste $600 calling your attorney just to get some wishy-washy, equivocating answer like “Well, it’s not clearly illegal, but it’s not clearly legal, either, so let me do a little a research,” then hand over another $5,000 when he completes his “research” only to tell you exactly the same thing again.

Enhanced focus: The less time you spend making, marketing and distributing pornography, the more time you have to focus on other aspects of your business, like tracking how much time each of your employees spends in the bathroom in an average week, repainting and selling the party bus your company hasn’t used since 2007 and sorting through the 41,000-plus business cards you’ve collected at trade shows but never looked at once you got back to the office.

It might get that Weinstein guy to shut the fuck up for a couple of minutes: Sure, he’d probably just carry on his campaign by trying to get OSHA to retroactively fine the Mitchell brothers for failing to use condoms in Behind the Green Door, but without the porn industry producing any new movies to kick around, Michael Weinstein likely woud shift his attention to the second-most-pressing item on his current agenda: bagging on Gilead Sciences for stealth marketing Truvada as “PrEP” (pre-exposure prophylaxis) for HIV prevention.

I’m sure skeptics will argue a ban on porn would reduce the size of the market and greatly complicate billing customers. They’re right, of course, but at a price ranging between $40 and $80 per gram, just think of how much you could charge for a single DVD — particularly if you make the DVD box cover out of something quite heavy, like lead or bronze. (On a related note, cadmium, while certainly heavy, is probably not an appropriate metal in which to package consumer goods.)

There may be other ways for the industry to increase consumers’ perceived value of porn, but I doubt any of them would have an effect as fast and dependable as a full-on global porn ban.

Plus, despite hoovering another set of lines the size of prehistoric caterpillars, I’ve been unable to come up with anything better — although at this rate, I’m pretty sure I’m not getting any sleep until mid-November or so, so I’ll certainly keep trying.