How a drug smuggler, who got caught with 6,500 ecstasy pills, went on to build a $30 million tech business

21-year-old Duane Jackson from east London arrived at Atlanta airport in 1999. Head down, he collected his suitcase from the conveyor belt and darted straight towards the "Nothing to Declare" lane.

'Step this way please," a member of airport security interrupted, before Jackson had reached the anonymity of the arrival lounge.

After a close but inconsequential inspection of his suitcase, Jackson nervously nudged his shoulder bag behind him, hoping it would be ignored.

"And that one," the officer snapped.

Jackson's suitcase was clean, but inside his shoulder bag was 6,500 ecstasy pills, hidden in a big bottle of talcum powder and a pair of gutted Walkman speakers.

As the airport security officer ripped open the talcum powder bottle, hundreds of ecstacy pills wrapped in clingfilm dropped out. The eruption of powder hid nothing: Jackson's guilt was obvious.

"There was no cleverness to it at all," Jackson told Business Insider, in the lounge of the Hilton Hotel near London Bridge, 17 years later.

In the years since he got arrested at Atlanta airport, Jackson has spent time locked up on both sides of the Atlantic as a convicted drug smuggler. On release, he built KashFlow, a business The Guardian reported was sold in 2013 for around £20 million ($30 million.)

Now he is campaigning for prisoners to be encouraged to make use of their mis-used entrepreneurial urges on release. According to a new report from the Centre for Entrepreneurs, this could save the UK tax payer £1.4 billion (about $2 billion) per year, through dramatically lowering re-offending rates.

We sat down with Jackson to ask more about his own incredible journey from convict with no qualifications to multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur.