We did what the article says in Massachusetts last year, I was there for hemp fest and then through the November 2008 election and into April of this year to see it implemented.

Decriminalization failed the year before in general assembly, a petition was gathered and signed by enough people to put the issue on the ballot directly, and an overwhelming majority of voters (I think it was like 75% which is ridiculously lopsided for a political issue) supported decriminalizing possession under an ounce and a fine of $100 for those caught with an ounce or less. Within a few months the law cleared the governor's desk (he had to, it would have been political suicide to mess with a such an overwhelmingly popular voter-initiative, even though he would have probably preferred to ignore it since he opposed it the year before when it was a bill rather than a voter initiative).

But anyway, yeah it can be done, even with a shitty governor. When we left Mass in April, cops in a lot of towns weren't even issuing tickets for possession, they were just emptying it out and stamping it in the ground with their boot or confiscating it. They said the law was too poorly written to be enforced. They said they couldn't issue tickets because they didn't have the proper forms or something, and they said they couldn't force people to produce identification unless they were driving, so if a pedestrian was smoking and knew his rights under Massachusetts Law, he could tell the cop "I'd rather not identify myself" and he could be detained so the cop could try to figure out who he was, but not for very long, and the cops didn't see it as worth it. In a lot of jurisdictions they just didn't even bother writing tickets, and in other jurisdictions they did. Almost everywhere it became kind of a joke and I think the cops were embarassed to be writing people tickets for it, even more than they used to be embarassed when they would charge people with felonies and ruin their lives for such a joke of an imagined evil.