In a wide-ranging interview with the New Yorker‘s David Remnick released last week, President Obama stated, “I don’t think [cannabis] is more dangerous than alcohol,” and spoke out in favor of the social justice benefits of ending marijuana prohibition.

“‘Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,’ [Obama] said. ‘And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.’ But, he said, ‘we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.’ Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that ‘it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.'”

The president’s comments weren’t entirely positive. He called marijuana consumption a “bad habit and a vice” and said, “I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.” He also said he thought the “experiment” in Colorado and Washington would be a “challenge.”

But President Obama’s distinct rejection of the usual official fear-mongering about marijuana caught the attention of many and set off a new round of debate in the media about the relative harms of alcohol and cannabis and the societal costs of prohibition.

It also prompted Representative Jared Polis (D-CO) to invite the president and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) – who recently spoke out in favor of legalizing medical marijuana – “to visit Colorado and join me to visit a legal dispensary and grow operation to see how the law is being implemented in the state.”

“I am confident,” Polis continued in his invitation, “that when you see Colorado’s work to implement the law while protecting children and raising revenue for our schools firsthand, we can begin to make similar efforts on a federal level.”