A father died of an accidental overdose after taking 150 tablets a day of Imodium.

Aaron McCaffrey, 27, from Manchester became addicted to diarrhoea-relief tablets that he had stockpiled.

On January 13, he took a large quantity of painkillers and was found collapsed in a supermarket toilet.

He was taken to Tameside Hospital and was put into an induced coma, but died six days later. 

Today, a coroner called for a limit on the sale of the medication used by millions of people in Britain. Miss Harvey said she was told that medics had to wait for the drugs to leave her partner's system before he could be woken up from his coma.

But because the nature of the overdose was so unusual, doctors did not have any idea how long that would take.

'It was really scary, because in the beginning they didn't know how to treat him. They had to contact another hospital to ask how to,' she said in January. 

'For us it was scary because they said they hadn't seen anything like it and we didn't know what was going to happen to him.'

Miss Harvey said Mr McCaffrey was a 'fit young man' before his collapse. 

'This was a total shock to everyone when this happened, and of how it happened,' she said. 'He had four more cardiac arrests when he was in hospital and we were told that he had taken hundreds of pills on the day that he died. It was a shock to us as well that he had taken that much.'

The coroner has referred her findings to MHRA. A spokesman for the regulator said: 'Over-the-counter medicines are safe and effective when used in accordance with instructions on the label and in the patient information leaflet. There is a risk, however, with any medicine that people may deliberately or inadvertently misuse the product. Last year, doctors warned of an alarming new trend of people using anti-diarrhoea drugs such as Imodium to 'get high' - with fatal sometimes consequences.

Medics say the over-the-counter medication - which contains the active ingredient is loperamide - is being used recreationally and drug addicts are taking it to manage their addictions.

While loperamide works by reducing the movement in the intestinal wall - to prevent diarrhoea - some medical literature suggests at high doses it can cause euphoria.

But it is also extremely toxic to the heart - and the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine has documented the case of two people died of an overdose as a result of taking the drugs.

Dr William Eggleston, of the Upstate New York Poison Centre, and the study's lead author, said: 'Loperamide's accessibility, low cost, over-the-counter legal status and lack of social stigma all contribute to its potential for abuse.