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I'm sure he means well. And from his perspective, he's making the world a better place. After all, it's those scumbag career criminals that are fucking shit up, not the street guys with a habit and the closer we can get to them the better we all are, right?

But this presumes that (1) the street guys have any access to the career criminals (2) there's equivalency between crime and punishment and both assumptions are readily challenged.

I mean, Brian was told that he probably wanted to stop dealing. Brian was making plenty of money dealing, so he wasn't about to stop. So the cartels stopped his ass. He was fully guilty of committing felonies. But he's also dead for buying and selling pocketfuls of the product the coast guard seized cargo-planefuls of. And your buddy would no doubt argue that the goal is to save Brian and punish the guys who cut his head off and threw it in a ditch. But an ecosystem that exists surrounded by punishment and betrayal is necessarily going to get more and more brutal over time.