TEL is based on metallic lead but it's markedly different from fishing line sinkers. Nasty, nasty stuff indeed.
TEL can cause acute or chronic lead poisoning if inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Indeed, the industrial chemist widely given credit for discovering the antiknock properties of the compound, Thomas Midgley, Jr., was forced to leave his job for several months in 1923 in order to recuperate from lead poisoning. From 1923 to 1925 several workers suffered agonizing deaths from acute lead poisoning at the first plants built by the General Motors Corporation, the DuPont Company, and the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) for producing TEL on an industrial scale. The dangers of lead poisoning were well known at the time, publicized by such occupational-health advocates as Alice Hamilton of Harvard Medical School. Procedures were installed at TEL plants for safely processing the compound, and officials from the automobile and oil industries (including Midgley himself) succeeded in convincing government health authorities and regulators that the minute quantities of lead emitted from engine exhaust had not been proved to constitute a danger to public health. As a result, use of TEL was approved, and “ethyl gasoline” became the standard antiknock formulation for use in automobile engines.
unlike fishing sinkers, TEL has its own precautions for use directions and hazards. 
https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1817.pdf#mce_temp_url#
You get to do as you choose but I think I'd just as soon avoid exposure and really don't appreciate others poisoning me with the exhaust from their contraptions.