If you think that methanol is the true reason that distilling is illegal then I've taken it upon myself to enlighten you.
While it is true that methanol is deadly, it's easily seperated as it's lighter than ethanol and therefore is distilled first. This separation is called "heads" in the industry.
Any distiller knows this as it's common knowledge.
The reason distilling is illegal is because it's avoiding high taxes that pockets like to keep.
Marijuana wasn't outlawed because dope smoking jazz crazed negroes rape white women either.
Homebrewing wasn't legal until the seventies by the by.
Maybe home brewing wasn't legal until the 70's but it didn't stay that way so clearly the government doesn't kowtow to the corporations quite like you think they'll do with marijuana. Perhaps home brewing wasn't made legal until the 70's because it wasn't happening on a big enough scale to worry about legality one way or another. I know in the 60's I wasn't hearing a bunch of news stories about cops raiding someone's home because they tried to brew up a little of their own beer rather then buy it.
As for hard liquor obviously distillers know the language of their business and they also know the ways to do it correctly but distillers aren't who we are talking about making liqour at home for personal consumption. I've never heard of anyone saying, "You know what I'm not happy with the quality of the liquor I buy or the taxes I pay on it. So much so in fact I'm going to set up my own still and make my own." I seriously doubt if someone did the feds would rush in to bust them just to stop from losing the little bit of taxes they would lose if someone did distill for personal consumption. What you do and did hear about though were people seeing an opportunity to make money buy distilling their own liquor and undercutting the competition by selling without all the taxes or the overhead of safety/quality regulations and in rare cases you did hear stories of people being harmed by such unregulated spirits.
People who grow their own weed now can do so fairly safely if they keep it low key and practice some sensible precautions to not be detected. The people that get busted are mostly those who not only grow but also distribute it because 99.9% of them don't care who they sell to as long as they get their asking price. Beyond people that distribute the only people that get busted are the ones that are careless. If the government were so hellbent on preventing marijuana from being grown they would do alot more to detect it then they do now. Sure in some places they fly around with their special cameras in helicoptors but only in areas where they see that home grown weed is being sold on the street.