OBJECTIVES: Benzodiazepines (BZDs) are a neuropsychiatric class of medicines that have Wide clinical indications as label and off-label uses, additionally BZDs have a potential for abuse and misuse. For importance of BZDs in clinical and social issues such as addiction and crime, we use price elasticity of demand (PED) to recognize the effect of price in the amount of demand of these medicines in Iran, previous research for medicines in this class only focus on diazepam that reported contrast results as inelastic and elastic in two separate research.

METHODS: We use time series analysis with STATA 14 for this analysis. our data are given from annual statistics from Food and Drug Administration of Iran's Ministry of Health (MOH) Also, we use SPSS 24 for checking normality test, EasyFit 5.6 for find the best statistical distribution and Excel 2016 for draw demand curves for BZDs

RESULTS: Our study show PED for BZDs in Iran pharmaceutical market is 0.41, this class of medicines denies Normal distribution (P-value = 0.028), but we find BZDs have Cauchy statistical distribution with σ = 0.07 and μ = 0.36 in Iran

CONCLUSIONS: We find that BZDs have inelastic demand in Iran. various clinical indications inside urgent and habit of usage, low-level price and wide availability could create inelastic demand for this class of medicines in Iran