The discovery of a 2ft-diameter drone in the grounds of the White House on Monday – its operator a government employee who told investigators he had been drinking – has led to renewed calls for comprehensive laws to cover drone use in the US.

President Barack Obama said creating a framework for drone laws was one of his duties during his final two years in office.

“We don’t yet have the legal structures and the architecture both globally and within individual countries to manage [drones] the way that we need to,” Obama said in a CNN interview.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned most commercial drone operations, though that is expected to change in the next few years. Researchers and enthusiasts believe the government is moving too slowly; the FAA has estimated that the introduction of regulations could put 7,500 commercial drones in the sky within five years.

“I’ve assigned some of the relevant agencies to start talking to stakeholders and figure out how we’re going to put an architecture in place that makes sure that these things aren’t dangerous and that they’re not violating people’s privacy,” Obama said.

The White House said the drone that came down in the grounds of the executive mansion posed no threat. The president was in India with the first lady, Michelle Obama, at the time of the incident; their daughters Malia and Sasha were in Washington.

A secret service officer “heard and observed” the drone but agents were unable to stop or deflect it before it crashed.

Economists have predicted that drones will make up a global market worth $1bn by 2018. Brendan Schulman, head of commercial drone law at the law firm Kramer Levin, said regulations on commercial operations would be unlikely to stop someone with malicious intent.

“I hope regulations that come out in the near future will recognize the incredible benefits of the technology and not suddenly overly constrain their use because there may be the occasional incident like this that gets a lot of attention but isn’t really representative of what people are doing,” he said.

Last year, police investigated more than 20 illegal drone flights in the Washington DC area. One person flew his drone near the Lincoln memorial; another was found climbing a tree a few blocks from the White House in order to fetch his drone, which had crashed.

Recreational drone flights are currently limited to an altitude below 400ft and are not permitted in densely populated areas. Drones are also not to be flown within five miles of an airport and must always be within the operator’s sight.

The latest reports say the man who operated the White House drone told investigators he “had been drinking” and had gone to sleep after losing control of the device, not realizing until the morning that it had crashed into such valuable property and caused the area to be swarmed with emergency vehicles in the middle of the night.

Robert Naiman, policy director at the Just Foreign Policy thinktank, said the incident was an important reminder that the Obama administration’s use of drones has serious implications in other parts of the world.

“That reminds you that there are places in the world where people live with this kind of fear all the time,” said Naiman. “In Yemen and Waziristan … there are CIA and US military drones flying overhead all day long and the drone could drop a bomb on them anytime.”

An internal Pentagon report obtained by the Guardian this month showed that the Defense Department internal watchdog, the inspector general, suggested that the army’s expanding drone fleet was a waste of money.