Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino Reveals He Was in Withdrawal During Infamous Head-Butt 'Jersey Shore' Scene
Sorrentino said he would go from having six painkillers a day to running out.
Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino remembers being high on drugs during a scary incident on the set of Jersey Shore. During an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the 41-year-old reality star opened up about how developing bad habits, how much money he has spent to enable them, speaking about how his addiction to painkillers had even gotten so bad that he smuggled in the drugs whenever he was filming.
Sorrentino says he would limit his intake of painkillers to two a day. This soon turned into six, and eventually, he would run out. When he spoke about a famous Season 4 episode of Jersey Shore in Italy during a fight with Ronnie over Sammi "Sweetheart" Giancola, he talked about landing in the hospital as he headbutted a concrete wall in the middle of a fight.
"You guys saw in Italy when I ran my head into a wall," Sorrentino said. "I was going through withdrawals at the time 'cause I had ran out of pills." While Sorrentino wasn't proud of it, the show's success made him incredibly wealthy, so much so that he used $500,000 to fuel his addiction.
"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 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 now regrets how much money he wasted supporting his addiction. "When you think of that number, when you hear that number, that's a good college fund right there," he noted. "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."
The fact that he was able to maintain such an addiction is, as he said, "insanity." "I mean, when the lawyers told me, 'You spent about half a million on cocaine and oxycodone,' I was like, 'Man, that definitely sounds about right,' because it was true," he said.
"I got to the point in my life I couldn't hide it anymore. 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. Once I started to become sober, I really just turned everything over and was doing everything differently." Sorrentino, who attributes his sobriety to his wife, Lauren, and his mother, Linda, will celebrate eight years of sobriety in December.