Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino says he spent $500K on drugs

Mike Sorrentino, infamous for flashing his abs as Jersey Shore’s The Situation, is opening up about his struggles with addiction.

Ahead of his upcoming memoir, Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation — How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison, Sorrentino delved into the severity of his substance abuse issues, which were so exacerbated by stardom that he estimates spending half a million dollars to fuel his drug habit.

“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,” the reality star recalled in an interview with ET. “That was my problem for many years — how do you turn off the excess?”

He continued, “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.”

Jersey Shore — which also starred Pauly D, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, Jenny “JWoww” Farley, Vinny Guadagnino, Angelina Pivarnick, and Deena Nicole Cortese — launched Sorrentino into reality TV fame over the course of six seasons on MTV. The financial success, the former star admits, was “like gasoline on fire” for his addiction struggles.

Reflecting on it now, Sorrentino cringes at the amount of money he put toward his habit.

“When you think of that number, when you hear that number, that’s a good college fund right there,” he pointed out. “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.”

Sorrentino added that he was not only “into everything,” but would keep various pills on him “at all times” in his Louis Vuitton bag. He said the stash included  a couple hundred Roxicet, 150 Percocets, 100 Xanax, 100 Valium, along with weed and cocaine. He also admitted that while filming Jersey Shore, he would smuggle drugs into the house.

“It was extremely hard,” he said. “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.”

Sorrentino initially did a 60-day stint in rehab in 2012, and was sober for nearly a year before his relapse.

“I didn’t get a sponsor. I didn’t have a recovery network. I didn’t go to meetings. I didn’t take the suggestions” he told Asbury Park Press in 2018. “I was going to try to do it my way. And obviously I was wrong.”

He returned to rehab in 2015 and recently told PEOPLE that he will be eight years sober this December.

“I’m happy to make it this far,” he added. “I was so wild in my twenties and thirties that being the family man that I am today — being eight years sober in December, a dad of two, married five years in a happy, healthy marriage — I’m killing the game.”

Sorrentino’s memoir hits shelves on Dec. 19.

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