An inquest will be held today into the death of a woman who died eight years after slipping into a heroin-induced coma.

Amy Pickard was 17 and seven months' pregnant when she went into town with a male friend in 2001 to buy a cot for her unborn baby.

The pair were found collapsed in a locked cubicle at public toilets in Hastings after it is believed Amy had experimented with the class A drug for the first time.

Amy lost oxygen to her brain and was taken to hospital.

Staff delivered her girl, named Summer Louise, by emergency Caesarean section, but the baby died five days later and Amy was left in a persistent vegetative state from which she never fully recovered after suffering brain damage.

A picture of her mother, Thelma Pickard, kissing her gravely ill daughter on her forehead as she lay comatose in her hospital bed highlighted the devastating effects of drug experimentation.

In 2007, Amy featured as part of a BBC documentary titled The Waking Pill after hopes that the drug Zolpidem - used as a treatment for insomnia - could help revive her.

Weeks after taking the drug, she began to breathe by herself, instead of through a hole in her throat, and she reacted to food and showed signs of awareness.

But, after years of receiving round the clock care, Amy died, aged 25, on October 10, 2009, at the Mary House care home in The Ridge, Hastings. Her cause of death was unascertainable.

An all-day inquest will take place at Hastings Magistrates' Court from 10am.