Memo to The Guardian: could you make your minds up please?

Assuming, of course, that there actually is an intelligence somewhere in the Guardian that has a mind that can be made up, could they try and give it a go on this when we all get to die thing?

But the next campaign for better public health is in a different league. Alcohol and obesity – what we eat and how much we drink – these are the stuff of our very souls.

You see, I can just about get the anti-smoking thing: of course the science being used is nonsensical hysteria and even if it weren't the correct solution is to allow patrons to decide whether to patronise smoking or non-smoking establishments. But it is at least theoretically possible that there is an externality here that needs to be dealt with. There just isn't with food or alcohol.

I can also see, and disagree with, the idea that people should be able to get a doctor to kill them if they want to die. I agree that everyone has the right to commit suicide if they want to die though. But I simply cannot understand your, opposite, reasoning.

Which is, as far as I can see, that people have a right to die when they want to and how they want to but only if you approve of that method? It's OK if they die of doctors, indeed the law must be changed to allow that, but it's not alright if they die of doughnuts and the law must be changed to ban that? Even if both are the choice of the person who has to do the dying?

It's not just that this doesn't sound very logical, it's that it sounds extraordinarily illiberal.

Either people should be allowed to choose the method of their death or not. And if the answer is that they should then I cannot see any reason at all why it should be righteous that they can do so at the wrong end of an injection but not through their own free ingestion of booze, baccy and burgers.

So I do wish you would make up your mind over this: should the State aid people in killing themselves or ban it?

Or are we using one of those irregular verbs: I believe liberal is people get to do what they want, you belive liberal is that people get to do what you want?