San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom called for a moratorium Monday on opening medical marijuana clubs in the city after learning that one plans to open on the ground floor of a city-funded welfare hotel.

Medical marijuana is a pathetic sham, but don’t say that too loudly in San Francisco. While lots of leftist politicians there seem to agree that pot clubs like the “Happy Days Herbal Relief Center” are a good idea to distribute “medicine,” there is a growing consensus that they need to be regulated.

Why? Well, for instance:

The medical marijuana club that grabbed Newsom’s attention was the Holistic Center, which plans to open Friday on the ground floor of the All- Star Hotel on 16th Street in the Mission District. The hotel is among a dozen that serve welfare tenants under the city’s Care Not Cash program and is home to some recovering drug addicts and substance abusers.

“That obviously raised some concern, not just from the community, not just from our Departments of Human Services, but from the residents within the building themselves, who appropriately said, ‘Hey, I’m just trying to get away from drugs and alcohol, and here you have a pot club downstairs,’ ” Newsom said. “It was at that moment that our office started looking at a way we could amend all of our contracts with the Department of Human Services to restrict the … use of medicinal marijuana clubs in (Care Not Cash) facilities.”

According to Matier and Ross, the clubs are growing like crazy, and “many of the neighbours aren’t happy.”

“There are 44 McDonald’s in all of Manhattan — more than any location in the world — and we have 37 marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco,” fumes Dogpatch Neighbourhood Association President Susan Eslick, who just learned of plans for a new dope dealership down the street from her, at the corner of Third and 20th streets.

“If these are for health,” Eslick added, “then we must have a huge epidemic.”

While unprincipled libertarians and others usually say that legalizing pot will make it harder for kids to buy (heh, like alcohol?), in reality:

Police confirm the clubs are a real magnet for kids . . .According to Hettrich, it’s not uncommon for one kid with a card to purchase an ounce or so of weed — then turn around and sell enough of it to his friends to support his own habit.

So now the government will have to come in and enact more regulations, entangling itself even further in the drug dealing business. Since, as the article also says, the pot club owners are making a killing selling the drug, it’s probably only a matter of time before someone starts arguing that the state should run things to cut costs for all the . . . errrr . . . sick people.

I visited one of these places in Los Angeles once, in an attempt to do some interviews for a video on marijuana. A spokesman told me that lots of their customers were grandmas, successful businessman, soccer moms and other mainstream types who just happened to be sick. He said that he and the staff refused to be interviewed for fear of how they would be made to look.

I was not allowed inside, but I watched people come and go for a while. Oddly enough, I didn’t see a single soccer mom. I did see a lot of 25-40 year old men who, to put it bluntly, looked like your stereotypical stoner.