It's pointless because we spend billions of dollars and compromise our own morality (see: all the killers they let walk) to put away one group, only to watch another group immediately spring up and be just as bad, if not worse. And this isn't a new trend, but a multi-decade pattern at this point. And all of this - the violence, the retribution, the lives ruined, the money thrown away, multiple countries turned into war zones - is a result of our insane drug laws. It didn't have to be like this, but we made it this way.
And calculated violence is violence used to make a point. The guy they beat to death until his body was "like a bag of ice" was killed to stop his investigations, but also to scare off other investigators.