Smoking Linked to Crime

Kerry Howley | June 30, 2005

Health nannies in Washington state find themselves unprepared for a pro-smoking insurgency, grown desperate in its last throes:

Organizers of an anti-smoking initiative were still picking up shattered glass from their Green Lake headquarters yesterday, one day after they discovered the weekend theft of petitions bearing about 1,000 signatures.

The theft and a similar break-in at a signature-gathering company in Lacey, Thurston County, come less than two weeks before the organization's July 8 deadline to turn in the roughly 225,000 signatures necessary to put the initiative on the November general-election ballot.

Whole thing here.