Gunfire at marijuana celebration

Gunfire erupted at an annual US marijuana celebration, injuring two people and scattering a crowd of thousands.

The event marked the first “4/20” counterculture holiday since Colorado legalised marijuana.

The man and woman who were shot were expected to survive, and police were looking for one or two suspects, Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.

Witnesses described a scene of panic. Several thought firecrackers were being set off, then a man fell bleeding, his dog also shot.

“I saw him fall, grabbing his leg,” said Travis Craig, 28, who saw the shooting and used a belt to apply a tourniquet to the man’s leg.

“He was just screaming that he was in pain, and wanted to know where his girlfriend was. She was OK. And then the cops showed up real quick, like, less than a minute. They put him on ambulance and left.”

The celebration was expected to draw as many as 80,000 people after Colorado and Washington voted last year to make marijuana legal for recreational use.

Aerial footage showed the massive crowd frantically running from the park.

A sizeable police force had been watching the celebration, but authorities, who generally look the other way at public pot smoking on April 20, did not arrest people for smoking in public, which is still illegal.

Police said earlier in the week that they were focused on crowd security after Monday’s attacks that killed three near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Stephanie Riedel said she was dancing with a hula hoop when she heard pops. A man ran past her, and she said the crowd started screaming and running away. She was about 20 feet from the shooting and heard four or five shots.

Nationwide, group “smoke-outs” were planned yesterday from New York to San Francisco.

The origins of the number “420” as a code for pot are murky, but the drug’s users have for decades marked the date 4/20 as a day to use pot together.

Colorado and Washington are still waiting for a federal response to the votes on legalisation and are working on setting up commercial pot sales, which are still limited to people with certain medical conditions.

In the meantime, pot users are free to share and use the drug in small amounts.

A pressure group that opposes marijuana legalisation, Smart Colorado, warned in a statement that public “4/20” celebrations “send a clear message to the rest of the nation and the world about what Colorado looks like”.