PseudoKiller:
All people are important, not just your immediate family and friends. If you're only in it for your family, then I think you're taking an extremely selfish (and narrow-minded) approach to life. Having some compassion for your fellow man (or woman, as the case may be), whether or not you agree with his/her particular ethos, is paramount to living a life founded with any semblance of ethics.
You're pretty quick to judge people who you know almost nothing about. It's a peculiar relationship between celebrities and their fans...and one more complex than you may be willing to admit. Life, as we all well know, can be extremely taxing as it is--add to that the enormous pressure one must feel as a public icon, and maybe you might be able to understand why so many of them resort to using drugs. And, obviously, you've never been suicidal, so please don't even begin to speak for people who ended up taking their own lives. Neither you nor I can speak for Kurt Cobain or Michael Hutchence, so don't even begin to make assumptions into what they may or may not have thought about anything before they died.
You said Elvis could have walked away from it all--forgive me if I don't believe you. If what you meant to say was that he could have walked away from the entertainment business, then, surely, you were right. But (as I construe it), I don't think that's what you were getting at. What he couldn't walk away from was his life as an internationally-known celebrity adored by legions of fans and the stress and anxiety most certainly associated with it...life just doesn't work that way.
It bothers me when you said you don't feel even a bit of sadness at hearing of Layne Staley's death--that is cold-hearted remark. And, yes, you do owe him something. You owe him the respect and empathy due any other human being on the planet. To deny that is to deny in a sense your own humanity. And while I'm not necessarily advocating a utilitarian existence here, I am trying to awaken you to what seems to be your desensitizedness to life. Hell, I'm constantly disappointed with life, too, but that doesn't mean I have to harden myself to it.