> you literally just pour out the first 0.5% of whatever comes out of the still

So you have to 1) remember that and 2) calculate how much will come out. You will be surprised to hear not everybody does.

> the "public health threat" is literally a prohibition scare-the-rubes meme.

I'm not from the US, we never had prohibition. We however had people poisoned (blind or dead) by methanol - I'm originally from the countryside and making and drinking fruit spirits is very common here.

Also more people dead from methanol sold as alcohol on industrial scale - like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Czech_Republic_methanol_p... - of course this happened because the alcohol taxes are high, but OTOH if they weren't high, people would drink even more, and that reverberates through the health system and society as a whole.