It's not hard to do without lead. You can weight flies with beads. Some people (me for one) like to fish lightly weighted flies with most of the weight on the leader. You can knot a Tungsten bead into the leader, 18" up from the fly. Fluorocarbon tippets make that work well. You can even hang a bead off a dropper, so the nymph drifts weightlessly, yet still at depth. Or you can use a heavy sparkplug fly up the leader or on a dropper, where that weight comes from bigger beads on the sparkplug, or where the sparkplug fly is wrapped with brass wire. Handling lead all time probably isn't a good idea for our own health. One consequence of cumulative lead poisoning (for humans) is brain synapse impairment. When I took calculus as a 40 year old, I couldn't help wondering if 30 years of lead wire didn't have something to do with how hard it was!