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The Tabado program aims to help high school students and apprentices quit smoking. Judged successful when it was first tested in 2009, it has been progressively deployed in metropolitan and overseas France since 2018. Its implementation, steered nationally by the inca (National Cancer Institute), is entrusted to various health prevention associations at the regional level in a logic of territorialization. In the light of a qualitative field survey carried out over three years as part of the evaluation of the program, the article analyzes the way in which the associations position themselves with respect to the relatively well-defined national framework of the program – which becomes more rigid as it is deployed – oscillating between compliance with the rules laid down by inca and negotiation of room for maneuver. More precisely, it highlights several types of resistance deployed by the latter, ranging from non-use of the program’s animation supports to more substantial questioning of the control or intervention logics that embody it. In doing so, the case study shows the ambivalences in which the associations are placed. While seeking to enhance their own specific action registers and cultures, they also tend to be recognized as central actors of the public action of preventive health.