Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino Admits to Spending Half a Million Dollars on Drugs

Mike Sorrentino, better known to Jersey Shore fans as "The Situation," is looking back on his time making the hit reality show, and the highs and lows that came with his overnight fame, most notably a serious drug addiction which ended up costing him approximately $500,000.

Prior to the publication of his memoir Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation -- How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, Sorrentino gave an in-depth interview about the severity of his substance abuse issues, which combined with instant stardom were like "gasoline on fire."

"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," Sorrentino recently told ET. "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 added that he was "into everything," and would keep hundreds of pills on him "at all times" in a Louis Vuitton bag, including "a couple hundred Roxicet," "150 Percocets," "100 Xanax," "100 Valium," as well as weed and cocaine. He also admitted that while filming the later seasons of Jersey Shore, he would smuggle drugs into the house.

"It was extremely hard. It consumed all my time, to try to get by MTV and production on how I was going to smuggle in drugs on a season," he explained. "And it obviously would vary on location as well. If it was Miami, if it was Italy... The one in Italy was very, very risky because you're traveling across the country and I smuggled in a couple hundred Roxys in a shoe, in an Altoids case that I disassembled... Once they went through the 10 somewhat bags they started to get tired. And I knew that 'cause I'm going season [after] season. I kinda know the routine and then eventually, once they got to the bag in question, I would say, 'Oh, I need to put those shoes on.' So, I took them out of the equation."

All in all, he estimates that he spent "a good college fund" on his habit. "I gotta just be accountable and be like, 'Yeah, that happened,'" he said. "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."

Sorrentino went on to describe the rock-bottom moment that came just days before he entered rehab in 2015: "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 got to the point where I needed to do something different, and the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," he continued. "Once I started to become sober, I really just turned everything over and was doing everything differently."

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