"When you hear that number, that's a good college fund right there."
Jersey Shore star Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino is celebrating eight years of sobriety next month, after first publicly acknowledging that he had been struggling with an oxycodone addiction in 2012. But after a stint in federal prison for tax evasion a few years back, it seems as though the 41-year-old is finally at a good place in his life, as a father of two with a third on the way.
However, in his upcoming memoir, Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation—How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, Sorrentino delves into the lowest points in his life. In a recent conversation with Entertainment Tonight ahead of the book's release on Dec. 19, he recalled some of those low points, such as when he tried heroin and dropped halfa-million dollars on drugs.
"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," Sorrentino explained. "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."
"I was depressed and [with] anxiety and self-doubt," he recalled. "I had given up on myself. I just wanted to get out of that space mentally."
To make matters worse, Sorrentino says that the money and fame were like "gasoline on fire" to his already worrying drug habit. As a result, he estimates that he spent a whopping $500,000 on drugs.
"When you think of that number, when you hear that number, that's a good college fund right there," he lamented. "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, and in the book I describe that I did spend about half a million dollars on cocaine and oxycodone."
"I was into everything. I had everything on me at all times in my Louis Vuitton bag," Sorrentino continued. "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. 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."
Still, Sorrentino became quite adept at smuggling drugs when he was traveling for MTV, but even then, sometimes it wasn't enough. Recalling a season four episode of Jersey Shore when he was hospitalized in Italy for head-butting a concrete wall in the midst of a fight with Ronnie Ortiz-Magro over Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola, he says it stemmed from running out of painkillers.
"You guys saw in Italy when I ran my head into a wall," Sorrentino added. "I was going through withdrawals at the time 'cause I had ran out of pills."
