You're correct that if the correlation were known to be 100% then the only meaningful advice one could give would be not to smoke. However, it's important to understand that "100% correlation" is a degenerate case of the Smoking Lesion problem, as I'll try to explain:
Imagine a problem of the following form: Y is a variable under our control, which we can either set to k or -k for some k >= 0 (0 is not ruled out). X is an N(0, m^2) random variable which we do not observe, for some m >= 0 (again, 0 is not ruled out). Our payoff has the form (X + Y) - 1000(X + rY) for some constant r with 0 <= r <= 1. Working out the optimal strategy is rather trivial. But anyway, in the edge cases: If r = 0 we should put Y = k and if r = 1 we should put Y = -k.
Now I want to say that the case r = 0 is analogous to the Smoking Lesion problem and the case r = 1 is analogous to Newcomb's problem (with a flawless predictor):
ETA: Perhaps this analogy can be developed into an analysis of the original problems. One way to do it would be to define random variables Z and W taking values 0, 1 such that log(P(Z = 1 | X and Y)) / log(P(Z = 0 | X and Y)) = a linear combination of X and Y (and likewise for W, but with a different linear combination), and then have Z be the "player's decision" and W be "Omega's decision / whether person gets cancer". But I think the ratio of extra work to extra insight would be quite high.
This is part of a sequence titled "An introduction to decision theory". The previous post was Newcomb's Problem: A problem for Causal Decision Theories
For various reasons I've decided to finish this sequence on a seperate blog. This is principally because there were a large number of people who seemed to feel that this sequence either wasn't up to the Less Wrong standard or felt that it was simply covering ground that had already been covered on Less Wrong.
The decision to post it on another blog rather than simply discontinuing it came down to the fact that other people seemed to feel that the sequence had value. Those people can continue reading it at "The Smoking Lesion: A problem for evidential decision theory".
Alternatively, there is a sequence index available: Less Wrong and decision theory: sequence index