How Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino Smuggled Pills into “Jersey Shore” Filming — Including His Secret Code Word

The reality star, 41, opens up about his addiction to prescription painkillers in his new memoir, Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino went to extreme lengths in order to sneak drugs into the Jersey Shore house while filming.

In his new memoir Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation, the 41-year-old went into detail about battling addiction to prescription painkillers and how the production team for the MTV reality show kept a close eye on him because of it.

Sorrentino describes the many ways he smuggled pills into the house each season of the MTV reality show. During season two, he relied on crushing his pills into powder and hiding them inside empty capsules of the herbal fat burner pills he was allowed to have in the house.

During that time, Sorrentino says he ran out of his supply, coming up with a convoluted plan to ditch cameras and producers in order to find more. However, producers later put a clause in his contract for season three stating that he’d lose money if he ever took off again.

“It was imperative I didn’t run out of drugs mid-filming again,” he wrote in the book. “Once more, I purchased and crushed up five hundred pills to smuggle into the shore house, relying on the old diet pill switcheroo. For the most part, it worked. Miraculously, I had judged correctly and didn’t need to concoct any escapes to reup. Season three is a little fuzzy because, well, I consumed five hundred pills during it, but it seemed to go pretty smoothly.”

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However, Sorrentino explained in the memoir that he had a bit more trouble smuggling his drugs while filming season four because the cast was shooting in Italy.

“My fixation remained on how I was going to get enough pills through customs to keep me high the entire time we were in Italy,” he said. “I settled on a new caper. I could fit 125 Roxicets into an Altoid tin. I filled four tins. Then, I removed the cushions from the inside of a pair of shoes — red and black Filas, I remember, my favorite shoes that season — and cut out enough room in the heel to place two Altoids tins in each shoe.”

“I then replaced the insole and packed the kicks in a large suitcase with twenty other pairs,” he explained. “My thought process was that with all those shoes, airport security wouldn’t catch the five hundred opiate pills I was smuggling into a foreign country. And I was right. The suitcase made it through immigration, no problem.”

Being overseas and maintaining his hard-partying lifestyle, Sorrentino ultimately ran out of his stash and was going through an involuntary withdrawal — a time known for the moment he infamously headbutted a concrete wall and nearly knocked himself out.

“To say I was miserable would be a gross understatement,” Sorrentino wrote of the withdrawal. “I couldn’t wait to get home and get a break. I needed to go directly to either my drug dealer or to rehab. I hadn’t decided which.”

But immediately after getting back to New Jersey to film another season, the only thought Sorrentino had was that he was “going to do whatever it took” to get his hands on more pills.

“Back in New Jersey, though far from free, my brain and body lit up with the possibility of the physical and mental relief offered by finally getting more pills,” he wrote. “Any considerations of rehab and quitting the show would have to wait.”

Related: Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino Recalls the Night His Mom and Wife 'Saved Me' from a Heroin Spiral (Exclusive)

Sorrentino, coming up with yet another plan, smuggled drugs this time by speaking in code and getting his friend, who he calls Johnny The Unit, to pick up pills for him rather than trying to get them himself.

“That season, if you heard me on the phone asking someone how many girls were coming to the club, chances are I was talking with one of my boys from home in code. ‘Girls’ meant pills, and the numbers equated to increments of ten,” Sorrentino wrote. “So, for example, if The Unit told me he was bringing five girls to the club that night, I knew I was getting a fifty pack.”

After coming up with a code, Sorrentino would often schedule a discrete handoff with his friends while partying at the club — all while surrounded by the Jersey Shore producers and camera crew.

“They’d go into a stall and wrap toilet paper around a piece of tinfoil holding fifty or a hundred pills, drop it on the nasty Jenks or Bamboo floor, and exit the bathroom without so much as looking at me. I’d make sure to use that stall,” he explained in the book. “Though I was still mic’d, the camera didn’t follow me in. I’d bend down, pick up the ball of toilet paper from the sticky club bathroom floor that no one in their right mind would touch, and I’d have my reup.

“We pulled that feat almost every time we went to the club in season five,” Sorrentino wrote.

Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, is out Dec. 19.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.

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