Justice & Law Quote by Joe Bob Briggs

"It's not a crime to get drunk" works because it’s both a dodge and a dare. Joe Bob Briggs, the shaggy philosopher of drive-in culture, isn’t delivering a temperance lecture; he’s staking out a line between vice and villainy, behavior and prosecution. The sentence is blunt enough to sound like common sense, which is exactly how it smuggles in its argument: if the state can’t criminalize drunkenness itself, then a whole world of moral panic starts looking like overreach.

Briggs’ critic persona has always treated American respectability as a kind of performance art - one he enjoys heckling. Read in that key, the line isn’t an endorsement of self-destruction so much as a defense of messy humanity. Getting drunk is framed as ordinary, even folkloric, the sort of lapse that fuels stories, songs, and bad decisions rather than court cases. The subtext is libertarian in the small-l sense: let people be foolish; punish harm, not appetite.

Context matters because "drunk" is rarely just about alcohol. It’s code for who gets policed and who gets forgiven. The quote nudges you to notice the selective enforcement behind public virtue: the frat party treated as hijinks, the street-corner intoxication treated as menace. By insisting on the legal distinction, Briggs also exposes the cultural one - that America often wants punishment to stand in for judgment, and judgment to stand in for care. The wit is in the simplicity: a one-liner that sounds like a loophole, but actually argues for proportion.