How Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino Smuggled Pills into Jersey Shore Filming — Including His Secret Code Word

Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino went to extreme lengths to get drugs into Jersey Shore house during filming.

In his new memoir Reality check: how to make the best of the situationThe 41-year-old detailed his battle with an addiction to prescription painkillers and how he was closely monitored by the MTV reality show’s production team as a result.

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

During that time, Sorrentino says he ran out of supplies, devising a convoluted plan to forgo cameras and producers to find more. However, the producers later put a clause in his contract for the third season stating that he would lose the money if he ever left again.

“It was imperative that I not run out of drugs again in the middle of filming,” he wrote in the book. “Once again I bought and crushed five hundred pills to smuggle into a house on the coast, relying on the old diet pill switcheroo. It mostly worked. Miraculously, I made good judgment and didn’t need to devise any escape to pick myself up. Season 3 is a bit of a blur because I took five hundred pills during it, but it seemed to go pretty smoothly.”

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Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.

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However, Sorrentino explained in the memoir that he had a little more trouble with drug smuggling during the filming of season four because the cast was filming in Italy.

“My fixation remained on getting enough pills through customs to keep me high the entire time we were in Italy,” he said. “I decided on a new caper. I could put 125 Roxicet in an Altoid can. I filled four molds. Then I removed the pads from the inside of a pair of shoes — the red and black Filas, I remember, my favorite shoes that season — and cut enough room in the heel to put two Altoids cans in each shoe.”

“Then I replaced the insole and packed the kicks in a big suitcase with another twenty pairs,” he explained. “My thought process was that with all those shoes, airport security wouldn’t catch the five hundred opiates I was smuggling into a foreign country. And I was right. The suitcase passed immigration, no problem.”

Being abroad and maintaining his hard-partying lifestyle, Sorrentino eventually ran out of his supply and went through a forced withdrawal – a time famous for infamously hitting his head on a concrete wall and nearly knocking himself out.

“To say I was miserable would be an understatement,” Sorrentino wrote of the retreat. “I couldn’t wait to get home and rest. I had to go straight to either my drug dealer or rehab. I haven’t decided which one.”

But right after returning to New Jersey to film another season, the only thought Sorrentino had was that he would “do whatever it takes” 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 physical and mental relief that finally getting more pills offered,” he wrote. “Any thoughts of quitting and leaving the show would have to wait.”

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Memoirs of Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino.

Mike Sorrentino

Sorrentino, coming up with another plan, smuggled the drugs in this time by speaking in code and getting his friend, whom he calls Johnny The Unit, to pick up the pills for him instead of 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 to one of my boys from home in code. ‘Girls’ meant pills, and the numbers were equal to increments of ten,” Sorrentino wrote. “So, for example, if The Unit told me he brought five girls to the club that night, I knew I’d get a package of fifty.”

After figuring out the code, Sorrentino would often schedule a discreet handover with his friends while partying at a club—as long as he was surrounded Jersey Shore producers and camera crew.

“They would walk into the stall and wrap toilet paper around tinfoil containing fifty or a hundred pills, throw it on the nasty Jenks or Bamboo floor and walk out of the bathroom without even looking at me. I would take care of that booth,” he explained in the book. “Even though I still had the mic, the camera wasn’t following me. I’d bend down, pick up a ball of toilet paper from the sticky club bathroom floor that no one in their right mind would touch, and I’d get my reup.

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

Reality Check: Making the Best of a Situation—How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Incarcerationis released on December 19.

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

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Source: HIS Education