How some guys survive snorting more than five grams of cocaine a day, or manage to drink two bottles of whiskey every 24 hours without keeling over dead is a miraculous. So, when we heard about Santino Quaranta’s drug intake during his youth—first name meaning “Little Saint” in Italian—we realized the guy must be some sort of miracle…or he’s related to Iggy Pop.

In an interview this week, Quaranta, 23, estimated he spent $250,000 during his troubled times on alcohol and a variety of drugs, including OxyContin and cocaine. He tested positive for cocaine in 2006, but because he was a first-time offender, MLS did not suspend him and the results were not made public. In the following 18 months, however, his addiction grew progressively worse, culminating with a three-month stay at a treatment facility in Malibu, Calif., last winter.

The frivolous spending of the youngster is enough to make you choke on your own spit, but you should wait until you realize how much the kid was actually taking.

“The worst time was when I was healthy, because I had to go out and find more pills on my own on the street,” he said. “Even when the doctors gave me pills, it was just 20 or 30. I would go through those in a couple hours. I would eat 10 at a time. “There weren’t enough pills in the world for me. You could have put me in Iraq and I would have found a way to get pills. I should have been dead a long time ago.”

Why does our imagination redirect us to that scene in “Traffic” when Michal Douglas is searching for his daughter in the city? Run into a pimps, Santino? That’s part of the story we don’t really want to know.

I Should Have Been Dead [Washington Post, via FanHous]
Image [LA Galaxy Official Site]