Yeah. Methanol itself isn't terrible for you and would be removed by your kidneys. The problem is that your liver breaks it down into a whole pile of horrendous stuff like formaldehyde, which will blind you if not kill you outright. Your body breaks down ethanol for preference to methanol, so the hospital treatment is to get as much methanol out as possible with a stomach pump, and then waking you up every hour for several days to slam vodka shots till you've pissed away all the meths. Alternatively, if you are just a massive alcoholic, you're likely to have enough ethanol in your system at all times that a bit of meths will pass straight through you.

Normal brewing of beers and things will produce unpleasant side products, methanols and fusel oils, which are not harmful in those concentrations. Normal distilling practice is to discard the first and last things that are produced in the still, so that you don't build therm up. Either an incompetent distiller, or someone wanting to maximise profits by discarding as little as possible, has produced a bad cut and killed a lot of people.