SHORT TAKES : Singer Helps Drew Barrymore

NEW YORK — Ex-drug addict David Crosby is helping alcoholic teen-age actress Drew Barrymore stay straight.

Barrymore, 14, lived with Crosby and his wife, Jan Dance, for three months as part of her program of recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, according to this week’s People magazine.

“I’m an old Hollywood kid, and I knew her story. I felt she had been dealt a short deck, you know, a fifth-generation alcoholic, and I didn’t want to see her go down the tubes,” Crosby told People.

Crosby, 48, of the rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has a well-documented history of cocaine addiction, hitting bottom in 1983 with an 11-month prison term on drug and weapons convictions. But now he’s straight.

Barrymore, the lovable moppet of the movie “E.T.,” announced last year that she had struggled with drugs and alcohol since she was 9. When she left a clinic in October, the Crosbys took her in.