A father was left furious when his four-year-old son found a bag of cannabis inside a second-hand video game.

Andy Brown, 30, who bought the Xbox game from Blockbuster, is calling for tougher checks on used goods before they are sold.

He said he feared for his son Riley’s safety when he discovered the stash in a copy of Fight Night Round Four.

Mr Brown, an estate agent, of Wheatcroft, Wick, Littlehampton, said Riley found a plastic bag of cannabis mixed up with tobacco, hidden inside the instruction manual.

He was horrified when the child walked up to him holding the bag and asked him what it was.

He said: "What if he had thought it was sweets, and started munching away on it?

"I took it off him straight away, but this could have been so much worse.

"It doesn’t bear thinking about.

"He had only been playing the game 10 minutes when he came down with the bag in his hand and asked, ‘Daddy, what’s this?’"

Mr Brown immediately complained to the Blockbuster store in Surrey Street, Littlehampton but was left furious by their response.

He said: "The store didn't seem too concerned and said they would credit free rental to my account.

"This is serious. It’s not a matter of a scratched CD or the wrong disk being in the box.

"The boxes should all be checked before they go on sale - they check for scratched discs but not for this.

"It has obviously been put in there by whoever traded the game to the store, not by anyone in the shop.

"I don’t want this to happen to anyone else."

A Blockbuster spokesman said the company would be carrying out a full investigation into the claim.