President Clinton committed a well-meaning, inadvertent but foreseeable blunder the other day when he asked a United Nations General Assembly special session on illegal drugs to stop “pointing fingers of blame” at each other. He should know as well as anyone that finger pointing is likely to be the only movement produced by this global exercise in futility.

When it comes to the war on drugs, there are two kinds of countries in the world: The poor and agricultural, where coca plants and opium poppies thrive; and the wealthy and developed, where cocaine and heroin sell. Depending upon which side you listen to, the reason this global scourge goes unabated is that either not nearly enough growers or users are in prison. The decades-long war on drugs has been fought without the enemy clearly identified.

This U.N. special session seems determined to perpetuate this failure. The rich, consuming nations are lining up behind a 10-year plan to eradicate, through fumigating agents, the Third World’s coca and poppy fields. Poison supply and demand withers. Accompanying this truly awful scorched-earth plan is a Band-Aid of compassion, a modest program of road building, school construction and other forms of development for drug-producing regions. President Clinton’s contribution to this flop-before-the-fact is a plan to have nations, corporations and foundations finance a $5 billion media campaign to tell kids all around the world that doing drugs is bad.

The producing nations, led by Colombia, don’t want to talk about eradication unless it includes payments sufficient to induce farmers into growing other crops. Of course, any assistance to impoverished peasants, whether in the form of roads, schools or cash, first would pass through the hands of governments already corrupted by the $400-billion illegal drug industry. And the producing nations want the using nations to beef up their border interdiction efforts, to build more prisons and to lock more people up. Punish demand and supply is worthless.

In short, the U.N. is taking a long, hard look at all of the failed policies that have created this monster of despair, wasted lives, ruined health, violence and official corruption and is in the process of redoubling that effort. With a $5-billion multi-lingual “Just Say No” campaign to boot.

There is a growing belief that the global war on drugs is doing more damage than drug abuse itself. Several hundred of the world’s most esteemed citizens — politicians, diplomats, physicians, scientists, jurists, economists, criminologists, philosophers, religious leaders and the like — have petitioned the U.N. to consider why past efforts have failed before it expands them and to open an entirely new debate on how common sense, science and a concern for human rights can combine to reduce drug-related crime, disease and death.

The U.N. has refused to hold such a debate. Its program excludes virtually all the non-governmental groups and experts who asked to speak. This is understandable — the U.N. is a body of governments, and criminalization and punishment are what governments know, what they do best. Along with pointing fingers of blame.