The Wire's FeliCIA 'Snoop' Pearson Arrested in Mass Sweep

Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson of HBO's "The Wire" was one of 63 people arrested in Baltimore early Friday morning as part of a large-scale drug sweep.

Authorities say they arrested everyone – large-, middle- and small-scale players – in the drug network.

"Our goal was to totally dismantle this organization from head to toe and everything in between," said Carl J. Kotowski, the Drug Enforcement Administration's assistant special agent in charge, in a quote in The Baltimore Sun.

They told reporters that they believe this will strike a major blow to drug trafficking in the city.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III told the Sun, "It should be a reminder to every bad guy in the city that we have a pretty good team coming to get you."

If history is any lesson, police will not be able to arrest every "bad guy" in the city and drug dealing, selling and using will continue, just as it has every year since President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971.

If this seems like one of the many "major operations" that took place on the critically acclaimed series "The Wire" that portrayed the drug trade in inner-city Baltimore, you're right. Pearson's real life before her role as a cold-hearted hitman for a local drug baron – a baron that had taken the place of another baron after a large scale raid – included a prison stint at age 14 for murder and another arrest when she refused to testify during another suspect's murder trial.

She has since secured an acting role in "Criminal Empire for Dummies" with Gary Oldman and Harvey Keitel.

Agencies across the country regularly pull off large scale operations against drug-trafficking organizations only to find different organizations have taken their place. In Oregon, state Attorney General John Kroger announced the arrests of 22 people that were part of a heroin market that operated in Marion, Clackamas and Polk counties on March 9.

Like those in Baltimore, Kroger warned those involved in the drug trade.

"Drug trafficking groups are on notice: If you sell drugs in Oregon, we are coming after you," he said.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, commented on Pearson's arrest on a Slate blog, saying that "This young lady has, from her earliest moments, had one of the hardest lives imaginable ... we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral."