Address Book Scripting

I’m trying to save time by creating some simple scripts to add values to Address Book entries. For instance, I have a whole lot of people in a group who are living in the same state, and I want to add this to all addresses. However, it doesn’t seem to be possible to get or set the state of an address:

    tell application "Address Book"
    	tell my card
    		set the_state to state of address 1
    	end tell
    end tell

This fails. With the very helpful:

Address Book got an error: Can’t make state of address 1 of my card into type reference.

Which means absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. Googling this string brings no joy. Now the weird thing is that if I switch over to another user, it works fine. Update: I quit all running Apps (with the intention of restarting, but System Update stopped me) and retried it. It worked. Something I was running was interfering with it, but I have no idea what.