The metropolitan Detroit, Michigan area has one of the nation's worst hard-drug problems, as Michigan residents are sent to hospitals or die as a result of cocaine or heroin use more often than in Los Angeles, Miami, or New Orleans. Washington, D.C., which has a similar-sized metro area, has only a fraction of drug-related hospital visits compared to Detroit,Michigan based on data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Drug Abuse Warning Network. Experts attribute the problem to several factors, including Detroit, Michigan international airport, the region's proximity to an international border, a large college-age population, and areas of poverty in Michigan. Between 1996 and 1998, Metro Detroit saw over 600 percent more heroin cases requiring medical attention than the Atlanta area and 68 percent more hospital visits for cocaine overdoses than in the Los Angeles-Long Beach region. Officials are seeing hard drug use cause a rise in crime and health problems. Nearly one-third of the Michigan's 9,950 reported AIDS cases are injection drug users, and over half of the cases are in Detroit, Michigan and Wayne County, Michigan. The increasing purity and lower price of heroin in Michigan are also of concern; in Metro Detroit, heroin was about 48 percent pure last year, compared to 27 percent in 1996. The higher purity of the drug also means that more new users may snort it instead of injecting it.