Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino has opened up about his past cocaine and oxycodone addiction and admitted he spent $500K to satisfy his drug habit.
“When you think of that number, when you hear that number, that’s a good college fund right there,” the Jersey Shore star, 41, told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published on Monday, November 27. “I gotta just be accountable and be like, ‘Yeah, that happened.’ I was wild. I was careless. I was reckless, and I fell prey to drug addiction.”
Sorrentino shares his story in his new memoir, Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, due to be published December 19.
Sorrentino’s reality TV fame led to several endorsements, including clothing, liquor and vitamin brands. While earning huge paychecks, he served eight months in prison in 2019 after pleading guilty to one count of tax evasion for not paying taxes on $9 million.
Sorrentino recalled how becoming rich pulled him into the dark side of life in the fast lane.
“I was a young and wild, careless kid, and once you gave kids millions of dollars and Ferraris and Lambos and girls screaming my name and yes-men everywhere, it was hard to turn that off,” he said. “That was my problem for many years — how do you turn off the excess? And I think it wasn’t just my problem. Most people in our world or in the celebrity world or in the entertainment world, they have a problem turning off the excess button.”
Sorrentino remembered his addiction snowballed and he was completely out of control.
“I was into everything. I had everything on me at all times in my Louis Vuitton bag. Everything — from a couple hundred Roxicet, which are 30 milligram oxycodone, then I’d have probably 150 Percocets on me, which are 10 milligram oxycodone,” he told ET. “Then I would have about 100 Xanax on me, 100 Valium, and if I wasn’t traveling on a plane maybe I would have some weed and cocaine as well, ’cause I knew that if I traveled on a plane, not a good idea to try and go through security with cocaine and weed on you.”
In May 2018, Sorrentino talked about the consequences of his drug addiction.
“I went down this road for many years. Of experimenting, partying, making bad decisions because, when you’re addicted, everything is affected by that substance,” He told the Asbury Park Press. “You don’t eat correctly, you don’t sleep correctly. Your relationships are affected and you don’t even realize that.”
Sorrentino completed a rehabilitation program in 2012 but later suffered a relapse. He was finally able to turn his life around when sought treatment for his addiction a second time three years later.
“When I finally got to rehab in 2015 that was definitely my low, but my lowest was like a day or so before that, when I did something I never thought I was gonna do,” he remembered. “I ended up trying a drug that I never thought I would try. A drug that kills most people. A drug that most people don’t come back from. A drug that I told myself that I would never do, that I thought was dirty. It was heroin.”
Sorrentino has now been sober for eight years, and he credits his wife, Lauren Sorrentino, with whom he is currently expecting his third child, and his mother, Linda Sorrentino, for saving him when needed help to turn his life around.
“I was depressed and [with] anxiety and self-doubt,” he said. “I had given up on myself. I just wanted to get out of that space mentally.”
