Stephen Ochs is a retired, board certified anesthesiologist with over 40 years of clinical experience. He is a former clinical professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver as well as the former Chief of Department at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs.

Dr. Ochs co-founded Colorado’s first free-standing, ambulatory, dedicated eye surgery center for cataract, retina and ophthalmic cosmetic surgery located in Colorado Springs. The surgery center performed over 26,000 cataract procedures using awake, conscious sedation techniques developed and refined by him.

To that purpose, JOS Pharmaceuticals was founded to develop a non-THC, all-natural, organic hemp CBD formulation for use as a premedication for the anesthesia technique of awake, conscious sedation. The drug product needed to be safe, non-addictive and effective as defined by the FDA new prescriptive drug pathway for approval. In addition, the product needed to be rapidly orally dissolving thereby providing a positive clinical feedback loop for accurate dosing, precision reproducibility and effective clinical management.

Beginning in 2012, he began seeing an increasing number of general anesthetic patients in the hospital exhibiting clinical signs of narcotic addiction complicating their peri-anesthesia and recovery course after major procedures. As a result, Dr. Ochs became convinced that a non-narcotic analgesic/anxiolytic needed to be developed to combat the increasing opioid national crisis of addictions including as a basis for new anesthetic premedication.

Stephen Ochs is a graduate of the University of Colorado—Boulder, the University of Colorado Medical School—Denver, post graduate medical residency training at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, the University of Denver College of Law and the University of Denver Daniels School of Business.